bluetomcaton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What are some 'must watch' talks?”
"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong: link "Normal Considered Harmful" by Alan Kay: link to this video
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Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful
powerfuloutlet
119 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 12 people: 10 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 curated list.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2012 to 2026.
- Presented by Alan Kay, pioneer of personal computing and OOP
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
59K views14 years ago12 recommendations
History and cultureSoftware designHistory of computingSoftware architecturePeople who shaped computing
Alan Kay argues that computing has become a pop culture rather than a science, urging programmers to study history and fundamentals.
A talk given at UIUC - Fall 2009Why it's here
12 people recommend thisWhat people say. Engineers frequently recommend this talk for its profound critique of modern software development and its historical perspective.
morphleon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How Transistors Work [video]”
…ss town. - Every time I see a cup of hot liquid I hear Feynman say "jiggling atoms" - Watch his hands and fingers telling the more accurate science story, simulating the electrons and atoms. - I would say that this the most important video to see for any human being on the planet. De second most important thing would be half of Alan Kay's lectures link to this video Great video's to watch with your kids! (from 3-4 years and older).…
programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends
Under “On the Industry/Community”
Normal Considered Harmful 01:07:26 by **Alan Kay** (2012)
cturneron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012”
You might find this entertaining - I'm watching a speech by Alan Kay at the moment where he says that computing is more pop-culture than science: link to this video
agentultraon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Light Table - Embracing Abstraction”
I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history: link to this video Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)
konstruktoron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Toyota's firmware: Bad design and its consequences”
Very well said. The focus on convenience and cool features over safety makes me really sad, and want to force automotive engineers to watch some Alan Kay talks. He loves to talk how people who don't know the history and basics of their craft will arrive at inferior solutions, for example in this one: link to this video
MichaelAOon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Where can one learn about the history of the internet and the protocols?”
Alan Kay's 'Normal Considered Harmful' is a good place to start (more about computing in general): link to this video
skadamaton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Dynamicland: The Next Big Thing Is a Room”
It's funny you say that. This is something Alan Kay talks about at length. For example, watch the first 20 mins of this talk - link to this video Essentially, he asserts that computing (or computer science even) isn't a real field (like biology or physics). Most people can't name the early computing pioneers whose work they build on (not true in Physics or Biology, we celebrate the pioneers) nor are they familiar with the work that was done in the Xerox PARC days. It's gotten so bad that a lot of computer science research just assumes that what we have now is what's going to remain forever. In the 70's, all kinds of interesting ideas and experiments were tried. Hardware implemented VM's, direct manipul…
j-pbon Hacker News • Recommends
On “What memory model should Rust use?”
Definitely! Although I'm not sure if Morphic1 is the way forward for UX on the web, despite it only being 10kloc. XD [Anybody stumbling upon this comment, and wondering what Alan Kay is/was up to, this might be a good philosophical starter: link to this video ] 1. link
logicalshifton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why is there so much useless and unreliable software?”
Alan Kay has done a few lectures about exactly this phenomenon: his talk 'Normal Considered Harmful' in particular is worth a look as it pretty much goes straight to the heart of the issue: link to this video
jjuranon Hacker News • Recommends
On “New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS”
If you're okay with a System 6 appearance, I've already made one < link >, for Advanced Mac Substitute < link >. I do appreciate Alan Kay's thinking, in particular his talk "Normal Considered Harmful" < link to this video > My own high-level language, Varyx, has somewhat LISPy internals and is very dynamic — for example, you can annotate a variable with a type that's determined only at run time — and has an eval() that insulates the caller from the payload and vice versa. You can sequester mutable state within a closure, which can't be cracked open. Using an experimental Varyx build with some bindings for Apple's Core Graphics API, I wrote a script that rendered an arrow cursor (which I donated to…
morphleon Hacker News • Recommends
On “CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989”
You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: link to this video Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows h…
grnon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The Programmers Before Us Were Better”
Similar claim was made by Alan Kay in his lecture Normal Considered Harmful 1. However he didn't complain about lower barriers to entry. Instead he pointed out that the people in the 90s ignored the work and experience of the past generations of programmers. He especially criticized the Web. 1 link to this video
tnorgaardon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install”
Interestingly, this was what Alan Kay was advocating for on the web: "A bytecode VM og something like X for graphics" 1. When Lars Bak and Kasper Lund launched Dart 2, I found it sad that they weren't more bold - left CSS and the DOM alone, and created an alternative Content-Type. So you can choose to Accept 'application/magic-bytecode' 3 before text/html, if your client supports so. Sadly, we ended up with Web Assembly, which by the few talks I've seen, appears to only cater to that of graphic/game developers, with no support for dynamic or OO languages. 1 link to this video 2 link 3 Or in Dart lingo, a VM snapshot.
armitronon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Pack Hunters of the Silicon Savannas”
This is obviously entirely false if one takes "genius" to mean someone who does things a non-genius would not be able to do. There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for. Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some…