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GOTO_ALAN_KAY
April 7, 2022
About a recent Alan Kay talk at the A follow-up to some earlier
2021 "goto;" conference with the remarks from 2006:
assigned title: "Is Software
Engineering Still an Oxymoron": [ref]
[link]
Here Alan Kay is talking my language, doing exactly the kind of
talk that I've had in mind for a few years now-- and if you're
paying more attention to me than Alan Kay, what's wrong with you?
But he goes in different directions than I would,
which makes this one particularly interesting for me.
My attitude is something like: "Kids these days,
they just don't know anything, they always want
to throw everything away and start over."
Alan Kays attitude is more like "Kids these days,
they just don't know anything, they don't understand
we need to throw everything away and start over."
some scattered notes:
SYSTEMS
SKETCHPAD
SAFER_WORLD
In dicussing the poor state of the art
of modern software engineering he
leans on two examples: a facebook In contrast, he praises the
outage of 6 hours, and two crashes of reliability of the internet itself,
Boeing aircraft-- praising the foresight and the
design skills of Vint Cerf, et al.
This comparison is a bit forced,
because a half-day outage of And notably, Kay
Facebook isn't going to kill anyone. also dismisses
Facebook as a So why would
Boeing however, evidently "legal drug" they you be upset
completely lost their created accidently about Facebook's
marbles, going with sloppy, but were happy to unreliability?
poorly tested avionics, run with.
which also, as Alan Kay "The food here
points out involved sloppy is terrible!"
hardware, not *just* sloppy "Yes, and such
software. small portions!"
This trio of examples does not at all
back up the story Alan Kay wants to
tell with them: is the devil really
modern software engineering?
It would work better as an indictment
of incentive structure of capitalism:
Isn't Facebook just rationally
doing just what they need to
do to be Facebook?
[link]
And isn't one of the reasons
the Internet could be the Alan Kay himself, in 2006: "A
Internet was because it lot of the success at PARC was
wasn't a commercial project? because we didn't know what we
were doing-- specifically, we
It could be there are weren't trying to make a
severe limits to what product. The silliest thing you
we can expect from can find at [a] research
commercial software and university is today's laptop. We
commercial services.... invented the Alto and it allowed
us to do things that weren’t
But that I suspect that commercially viable until the 80's."
would be a shallow
judgment also: American (But then there's a common
Industry could probably criticism of Xerox: how did they
do a better job than manage to invent all this stuff
we've been doing of and leave it to Apple to get rich
late, and we know that off of it? Maybe Alan Kay's
because it *used* to do interpretation of his job was a
a better job-- little too narrow...)
So what is it that's
really been messing us
up? What cultural shift
has led to this abysmal
drop in quality?
He proposes a medical analogy, suggests software
engineers need a "first do no harm" principle.
It often seems to me that the modern corporate
world *in general* could use a return to a
sense of business ethics. GETTING_A_HANDLE
A few generations post-Ayn Rand, there's no
commitment to anything *except* "selfishness".
My typical critism of "move fast and
break things" philosophy popularized THE_TOY_WEB
by Zuckerberg is that it makes an
implicit assumption that what you're Some ambition besides (or in
working on doesn't matter very much. addition to) Getting Rich
would be toward the good.
Alan Kay sees
Facebook's "move fast
and break things" as He tosses in a shot
an expression of the about how moving fast
"hackers" disease-- and breaking things Iteration and experiment,
appeals to teenagers, rather than top-down
So, Alan Kay is clearly delinquents, and planning based on theory.
on the side of Design, criminals.
putting emphasis on the (Though I don't
three stage cycle: Though just to be think Alan Kay is
clear: in these consistently in
Design worlds "hacking" favor of one or
Simulation is more like "hack the other.)
Build/Deploy writing" than
"breaking in with
I think I tend to think in a metaphorical
terms of "testing" rather machete".
than "simulation" where
the tests are intended to
be automated, so they can Alan Kay, for many a
be run repeatedly during decade, has chased his own
the entire process, which vision of "objects" as This approach has
is likely to be interative: small, independent a reputation for
there will be re-design perfectly encapsulated being "hard to
and re-building after pieces of code that work debug" (e.g. the
people see the finished together by sending Gnu Hurd kernel),
product. "messages" to each other. which may fuel
Kay's interest in
The current fad for "simulation".
But then, if you "microsevices" is
*couldn't* do somewhat similar.
something like
"simulation" it's
likely you
couldn't write
tests either.
And if you really *are* working on
something like aircraft avionics (not
just "the toy web") then you really do
need some way to do simulations-- you
don't just do iterative trial runs with
an actual aircraft.
Alan Kay talks about
optical illusions, making He sounds a bit California woo-woo
the point that we don't on occasion. (I wonder... was he
perceive reality so much one of the EST people?) EST
as a flawed model of it we
build up, which he calls
"The Dream". Consider the "Backfire
Effect". Does arguing
I know what he means, but he overplays the facts just make
that story: it's a story that many people dig-in? But there
people like quite a bit, they really are facts that show
don't want to let go of it. otherwise. So why did
people dig-in and cling
to the Backfire Effect?
DOUBLE_BACKFIRE
He suggests that industry has a habit of ignoring
much of what's known by the Computer Science field--
myself, I'm more skeptical of what the CS people
really know-- they (sometimes) embrace doctrine to
the point where they feel no need to check what they
know. As Scientists go, they seem remarkably light MODEST_PROPOSAL
on Experiment, which may be why mere hackers can
often kick their butts out in the field.
Alan Kay often makes points remarkably
similiar to what I would:
He trots out the old Pogo line:
"'We have met the enemy and he is us'"
And adds the comment:
"And we don't understand us.""
He remarks that one of the reasons many
people go into computing is because computers TECHIES_FALLACY
are much less messy than human beings are.
BITWASTES_BEGINNINGS
Alan Kay is remarkably contemptuous
of the current state of the art of
everything (he puts my curmedgeon
skills to shame): e.g. C code is
just glorified punchcards.
He flashes a cartoon of painting Okay, so I'm a
yourself into a corner, where the horder/packrat,
paint is labeled with names of Now myself, I'm but I'm a *high
popular software including things temperamentally functioning*
like Linux. He dimisses our inclined toward horder/packrat.
reluctance to throw it away and start backwards
over as the cognitive bias of "loss compatibility--
aversion", and compares it to a
monkey trap. Invoking the cognitive bias of
"loss aversion" is a cute line of
argument, but it's often observed
that these standard cognitive
biases frequently come in
opposing pairs, and knowing which
one applies is the real trick
(Am I suffering
from Dunnig-Kruger Starting over from scratch
syndrome this and doing it *right* this
morning, or is time (dammit) often has a
it Imposter certain appeal, but it can
Syndrome?). lead you into a well known
trap: "Second System Syndrome".
COGNITIVE_BIAS_BIASES
You often know less than you
And interestingly, it think: the "useless complexity"
seems as though the you're trimming away may have a
evidence for "loss hidden purpose.
aversion" is weaker
than we've been led
to believe.
This may turn out to be
another case like "the
backfire effect"...
LOSING_LOSS_AVERSION
Unlike Alan Kay, it seems to me that I gather it was getting to
far from being reluctant to start the JS fans as well, so
over, kids have a tendency to throw they've backed off on the
away existing languages and libraries incessant "innovation".
for the latest bright and shiney.
Alan Kay-- quite rightly, I think--
makes fun of Zuckerberg's slogan
"move fast and break things"-- but
the javascript-framework-of-the-week
club always seemed to me like another
manifestation of that madness.
I'm almost always in favor of building
on what we have, rather than starting
over after every time a new graduating
class hits the streets.
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