Full talk: http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ - this version is where my timestamps apply.

• Also available is the talk broken down into 4 parts: http://www.tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/

Referenced several times on Hacker News but strangely, got little attention there. This talk is a favorite of mine as Kay challenges our preconceptions with a whirlwind tour of computing over half a century, with the overall message that we've barely begun to codify, teach, and learn best practices in creating software. My notes on his talk are below, often with a leading time-stamp should you want semi-random-access.

• Credits working w/ smart team of colleagues, at VPRI.
• He starts w/ saying it's the 50th anniversary of object-oriented programming, a term he invented in 1961. Back then, they thought we'd be developing at higher level than C by now. We haven't advanced nearly as much as we'd like.
• 4:10 Bob Barton's machine was more advanced than today's computers,
  • Paper recommendation: "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer" only 6 pages long.
    • Barton's computer was built, it ran longest at a German bank, un-crashable.
  • We must study the past in CS, to gain perspective.
  • Barton's course: told students to read these key papers; then Barton would destroy all preconceptions. Best course Kay ever took at any level.
• 6:50 "The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality."
  • Barton destroyed students' preconceptions, and his own, to free their minds.
• 8:06 Make-and-Fix Paradigm
  • Story of the Tinker-toy computer; couldn't be re-built to work after its shipping to museum.
    • Comparison of today's software w/ Mexico City: individuals built own houses, lead to a terrible collective outcome.
  • 10:17 "When you have a setter on an object, you've turned an object back into a data structure." - big complications, w/o benefits.
  • 11:00 1 book = 400 pages = 20k LoC; a meter of books -> 1 million LoC; Empire State Building height = 441 million LoC or size of personal computing systems today.
    • As computer scientists - never mind engineers - is that how much code we really need to be running??
  • 13:30 complications run up even faster than complexity, by 10-1000x.
    • e.g. Microsoft Word's longtime justified-text bug - now 25 years old and still there because they cannot find the bug!
• 15:30 Creating, Scaling, Eternal Computing, Re-adaptations, Communicating w/ Aliens
  • The Internet is controlled in < 20,000 LoC. TCP/IP is superb: handles billions of nodes, has never been stopped, replaced all its atoms at least once, grew and adapted superbly.
  • 17:40 jump from "little gears" to biological-like behavior; the Internet is more like an organism, w/ self-repair, growth, adaptation.
• 19:30 From Make & Fix, to Grow & Negotiate
  • Think: how to make a system negotiate, so that complexity is tractable?
  • 21:50 Once we think of biology, we have to think of ecology.
  • 22:50 Move from manipulation (Make & Fix) to expressing meaning.
    • e.g. of meaning: Minsky's book Society of Mind
• 23:26 Learning from Biology
  • Images from "Machinery of Life."
  • Mistake: We made objects too small; the scale jump from molecules to living organism is too large.
• 26:45: Which is more important? IQ vs. knowledge vs. outlook
  • IQ? We (in the room) were all praised for being bright, almost from birth.
    • Imagine being born w/ twice IQ of Leonardo, but being born in 10,000 BC. Leonardo couldn't make a single working engine. Compare w/ Henry Ford.
  • or Knowledge?
    • Knowledge trumps IQ repeatedly.
    • e.g. of Henry Ford again.
  • or Outlook?
    • Ford benefited from Newton's invention of calculus, and the change of outlook Newton enabled in the West.
    • So an outlook, a point of view, is like 80 more IQ points!
    • Kay thinks CS in the USA is dead because of limited outlook.
  • Knowledge is silver; outlook is gold; IQ is lead weight.
    • "This is killing CS; a lot of people in CS don't want to learn anything."
    • It's easy to learn programming - and do it badly.
• ~31:00 IQ, knowledge, and outlooks in CS
  • IQ: A lot more clever people, but much more noise in the field from many more people in the field.
  • Knowledge: absolute amount much greater; but average practitioner hasn't learned much more.
  • Outlooks: number of powerful outlooks far greater; general outlook has changed little. Like pop music and pop culture, which barely uses what classical, jazz, etc. music has developed.
    • "CS has turned into a pop culture, and universities aren't helping, at least in the US."
• 33:30
  • Most people can only experience the present in terms of the past. Which means they can only conceive the future in terms of the present. - McLuhan
  • Cicero: He who only knows his own generation remains forever a child.
• 34:40 Human Learning & Memory
  • Analogy between rain and random gullies, and how humans learn - in a haphazard manner.
    • Ducks and imprinting: like programmers and programming languages.
    • Perhaps people should initially learn 2-3 languages at once.
  • 37:00 Past, Present, Future
    • The past is enormous!
    • Take a few moments each day reflecting on how the present is just like random rain gullies.
      • Look deliberately in the past you don't know.
• 39:22 The 'Arts'
  • Includes tinkering, engineering (principled tinkering) which preceded math and science.
    • Babylonian engineering -> cookbooks
  • Mathematics, science (400 years ago)
  • Our strain of humanity is 192k years old, as traced by mother's mitochondrial DNA. Science is very, very new.
  • Computing is mostly tinkering at this time, there's not much engineering, math, or science.
    • e.g. of real engineering: Empire State Building: 3000 people, 1 year, 2 stories/day, steel still warm from foundry - that's engineering!
    • We don't have engineering in software! We could not organize 3000 people to do something major within span of 1 year.
• 44:30 What is Science?
  • e.g. of bridge building, and longest bridge in the world.
• 47:30 Computer Science?
  • McCarthy's Lisp, on a t-shirt
  • How many t-shirts for MS Windows, Word, etc.?
• 49:30 Real Computer Science, e.g. Personal Computing as Phenomena
  • UI, Graphics, App Components, Applications, Meta-Translation, Engine Room, Low level utilities.
  • About a dozen powerful principles:
    1. Math wins, esp MetaMath
    2. Meaning separated from optimization
    3. Simulation of time
    4. "No centers" (Internet all the way down)
    5. "Model-T-Shirt" Programming
    6. "Sideways" Composition
    7. "Universal" Parametric Objects
    8. "Particles & Fields"
    9. ?
• ~50:00, Dan Amelang's work on graphics
  • Replace Cairo with its millions of LoC, with the Nile language.
  • "The Formula" for anti-aliasing, is just 81 LoC in Nile language.
  • Compositing, 90 LoC expressing 26 compositing ops.
  • Antialiased Vector Graphics, 81 LoC.
  • Sampling, for scaling and transforming bit-maps, 71 LoC.
  • Pen Stroking, for outlines, drawings, 3 kinds of caps and joins, 76 LoC.
  • Total, 318 LoC - far far fewer than Cairo's millions
• 53:50 But we have to make the Nile language
  • Paper from 1964: Meta II A Syntax-Oriented Compiler Writing Language by DV Schorre, UCLA.
  • Alex Warth, Using OMeta to make Nile, and using OMeta to make OMeta.
  • The idea: each problem space has a particularly felicitous point-of-view or outlook.
    • From problem-oriented languages then, to DSLs today.
    • Forgotten since PC era.
    • Very few students in US know this trick of making languages; yacc is a poor tool to do so.
  • "Whatever we think we know today, shut it off periodically, and see if we can find other things to learn about."
• Discussions online
  • At LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4325
    • Quite a few discussions agreed with power of DSLs, but how to ensure that different DSLs can mix and combine their power?
      • Last comment thread by dmbarbour answers that "orchestration languages" are vital. He's working on one approach, Reactive Demand Programming, http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/comparing-frp-to-rdp/
        • Reply to that references the Orc language: http://orc.csres.utexas.edu/