Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#erlang#smalltalk#alankay

Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay

Erlang Solutions

18K subscribers • 39 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 8 people: 6 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2026.
  • Presented by Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

76K views9 years ago8 recommendations

History and cultureProgramming languagesHistory of computingLanguage design and type systemsFunctional programming

Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay discuss the true meaning of object-oriented programming, message passing, and the history of computer science.

The next Code Mesh Conference will be on 8 - 9 November 2017 (with Workshops on 7 November) - subscribe to receive exclusive content, updates and benefits.

Why it's here

8 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a legendary conversation between two computing pioneers on language design and system architecture.

Moments people linked to

hailson Lobsters • Recommends

Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay
21View on Lobsters

u/fosforsvennein r/haskell • Recommends

Where did you people come from? How blind can you be?
17View on Reddit

lliamanderon Hacker News • Recommends

On “What Happens to OO When Processors Are Free? (2015)”

> Erlang != OOP as imagined by Kay... as I understand Kay's intent. You should check out the video0 of Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay - it seemed to me that Erlang was in some respects closer to what Alan Kay intended for OOP than even smalltalk was. 0 link to this video
View on Hacker News

dpeckon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Joe Armstrong has died”

That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn’t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. link link to this video link link I hope his family and friends can find some comfort in how much he was appreciated and admired in the development community.
View on Hacker News

genson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Gleam: A statically typed language for the Erlang VM”

…of a program communicate with other parts by passing messages 2. Every variable is static, as in if you declare that A is 12 you can not change it to be 13 Joe Armstrong had a way of explaining these things so that even i could understand, so i do recommend watching every talk you can find of him. I also recommend the interview he did of Alan Kay link to this video . But if you want to really get into concurrency i recommend a paper called "Communicating Sequential Processes" by C. A. R. Hoare. See link It's a "formal language" for dealing with concurrency. Go, and some other languages, implement a "CSP style" way of doing concurrency. Erlang doesn't do SIMD, nor GPU. However, it does world scale lo…
View on Hacker News

genson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Single Writer Principle (2011)”

Checking out what Alan Kay has to say about it might help: link to this video The way i see it OOP is about encapsulating/bundling data and the code that processes that data into one "object", that is isolated from other objects. The objects could only "communicate" with other objects by sending "messages" (data/events/something). Personally i don't like OOP, and think that focusing on data and how it's processed is a better way forward (CSP and such). It's.. a complicated matter.
View on Hacker News

Rendelloon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: If OOP is about message passing, why not sender.send(receiver, message)?”

…P" languages, and look at Erlang, it's completely different than what you expect. In Erlang, the "objects" are less like mutable structs and more like functional mini-programs that can create new programs, pass messages, and fail as you would expect. To get some perspective on both of their perspectives, here's "Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay": link to this video…
View on Hacker News

AceJohnny2on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Alan Kay did not invent objects (2019)”

Indeed, here's a email from Alan Kay about how his perspective is about "messaging" between objects: link (edit: derp, this is directly cited in TFA) Also, I loved this interview/discussion between Kay & Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, where the topic comes up again (because Erlang is also a lot about messaging between agents) link to this video
View on Hacker News

mempkoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “A Love Letter to Object Orientation”

Thanks, I'll check it out! When I implemented messaging for Abject, I used the Erlang model. I also added P2P support so objects can talk across the network. There is this great discussion between Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay if you haven't see it. link to this video EDIT: Just checked your smalltalk implementation. Very cool! Do you remember the Open Croquet project in the early 2000s? Way ahead of it's time. I wonder if a modern version of that could work today now that we have good VR headsets.
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tutorial: Metacompilers Part 1”

Ahh..META II 1. This is awesome. Was just mentioned again in the "Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay" talk 23. One of Alan's favourite papers. Joe: "Dan said if you look at this, you will lose a month of your life. And I did" Or words to that effect. Also the basis for OMeta4. I have to admit I've been avoiding it so far in order not to get diverted from architectural insights5 but this may just be accessible enough to dive on in. 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link 4 link 5 link
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Joe Armstrong Interviews Alan Kay [video]”

…l properties. Kind of like circles as the basis for astronomical orbits: they are "perfect", but the world isn't perfect in the same way, so trying to model the imperfect world with these perfect primitives leads to having to introduce epicycles/monads. My 2 €¢ Edit: “Functions are nice, but you need to advance the state of the system over time” — link to this video…
View on Hacker News

espeedon Hacker News • Mentions

On “META II: A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language (1964) [pdf]”

This is one of the papers referenced by Alan Kay in the talk posted to HN one day ago: Joe Armstrong Interviews Alan Kay link to this video ( link to this video ) Discussion: link
View on Hacker News

genson Hacker News • Mentions

On “What Happens to OO When Processors Are Free? (2015)”

>OO has been designed to model the world in the hope that this would make expressing business logic easier. OO was designed for multi processing by sending msgs between multiple processes0. Like nature does. However I do not find it suitable for most parallel computing work because race conditions. 0 link to this video
View on Hacker News

zengidon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007)”

Alan Kay once said (at an Erlang conference): "By the time the software engineering of a language gets in good shape, the language has become obsolete in terms of 'needed expressiveness'. Therefore in a 'Real' computer science, the best languages should serve as the 'assembly code' for the next generation of expression!" 1 He then proposed the hypothetical question: "What should Erlang be an assembly code for?" 2 I'm not sure if he knew about Elixir.. 1 link to this video 2 link to this video
View on Hacker News

nicklafon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tree Oriented Programming [pdf]”

I am quite interested to hear if anybody has any thoughts on the work of Valentin Turchin, the author of Refal. In an interview 1 conducted by Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay traced some of the key ideas of Erlang and Smalltalk to early papers by John McCarthy (Advice Taker), Carl Hewitt (Planner), Simula, and other work (including META 2, which apparently inspired OMeta). The theme here seems to be a favorite of Kay's: "late binding of meaning" used to build systems that scale just as well as biology. In his interview, Kay mentions Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines , which discusses various models of computation. Now, Alan Kay has long looked to biology for hints on how to scale.…
View on Hacker News

spinningslateon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, Carl Hewitt”

…builds on Erlang?" That's a tempting prospect. My personal wish list would include 1st class dataflow semantics and a contemporary static type system and compiler that's as practically useful as Elm's today. The key point is to build on what's been proven to work well, not throw it away and have to re-learn all the mistakes from scratch again. 0 link to this video…
View on Hacker News