Algunas veces reingreso a la matriz para buscar las grietas / Sometimes I re-entry the matrix to search for the cracks
You have to be a different kind of person to love C++. It is a really interesting example of how a well-meant idea went wrong, because [C++ creator] Bjarne Stroustrup was not trying to do what he has been criticized for. His idea was that first, it might be useful if you did to C what Simula did to Algol, which is basically act as a preprocessor for a different kind of architectural template for programming. It was basically for super-good programmers who are supposed to subclass everything, including the storage allocator, before they did anything serious. The result, of course, was that most programmers did not subclass much. So the people I know who like C++ and have done good things in C++ have been serious iron-men who have basically taken it for what it is, which is a kind of macroprocessor. I grew up with macro systems in the early ’60s, and you have to do a lot of work to make them work for you—otherwise, they kill you.
Alan Kay, http://
most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically #Java vocational training
Alan Kay, http://
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix #Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
Alan Kay, http://
The result is that this system today, called #Squeak, runs identically on more than two dozen platforms. #Java does not do that. If you think about what the Internet means, it means you have to run identically on everything that is hooked to the Internet. So Java, to me, has always violated one of the prime things about software engineering in the world of the Internet.
Alan Kay, http://
It’s well known that I tried to kill #Smalltalk in the later ’70s. There were a few years when it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It answered needs in a more compact and beautiful way than anything that had been done before. But time moves on. As we learned more and got more ambitious about what we wanted to do, we realized that there are all kinds of things in Smalltalk that don’t scale the way they should—for instance, the reflection stuff that we had in there. It was one of the first languages to really be able to see itself, but now it is known how to do all levels of reflection much better—so we should implement that.
Alan Kay, http://
#Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.
Alan Kay, http://
I would compare the #Smalltalk stuff that we did in the ’70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn’t put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago.
Alan Kay, http://
"So #Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as #Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?" Interview with Alan Kay : http://
One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects. -Alan Kay
http://
Los gobiernos están dispuestos a invertir en tecnología de punta para espiarnos, pero no para empoderarnos: https://
