I feel like my answers are quite trivial since nobody
really knows how to design a good language, including me.
(the rest is not related to the above quote)
Alan mentions that education doesn't happen fast enough. Here's a crazy idea, what if we leveraged the Internet to accelerate education? If 100 average programmers from HN paid $1000/year to a great computer scientist to teach them a few lessons per week it seems like everyone would win. That's a simple example and there would be overhead costs for the infrastructure to setup such a system, but it could have some interesting results. It would have the potential to become a new kind of higher education. You could choose to subscribe only to people you were interested in learning from.
I know there are a lot of unanswered questions about how it would all work. A big one in my mind is whether it would be interactive & collaborative, or broadcast style? I'd lean towards the former even though it'd be more complex.
It's really completely different from today's architectures and I have the feeling we're emulating a lot of the functionality in software today. This gives some credibility to Kay's claim that "a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today". (This number really baffled me.)
I always get tricked into thinking "Hey, some new stuff from Alan Kay" - only to find some link to something he said years ago. Perhaps putting the year in the title (2004 - or whatever the year the material is from) might prevent people who really like and follow Kay from getting their hopes up.
Alan mentions that education doesn't happen fast enough. Here's a crazy idea, what if we leveraged the Internet to accelerate education? If 100 average programmers from HN paid $1000/year to a great computer scientist to teach them a few lessons per week it seems like everyone would win. That's a simple example and there would be overhead costs for the infrastructure to setup such a system, but it could have some interesting results. It would have the potential to become a new kind of higher education. You could choose to subscribe only to people you were interested in learning from.
I know there are a lot of unanswered questions about how it would all work. A big one in my mind is whether it would be interactive & collaborative, or broadcast style? I'd lean towards the former even though it'd be more complex.