My tech hero: Alan Kay

There are very few people who really influence the world. I think one of those people is Alan Kay. If you’re a programmer I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with his work. He’s got some very interesting things to say about IT and programming in particular.

“To find the most interesting things about our field you have to go back 30 or 40 years.”

Kinda hard to argue with that sentiment. I can’t think of anything that’s been invented in computing in at least 20 years.

“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.”

Every time I get to manipulate a CSV file I wonder just why it is so difficult to manipulate data. You would have thought that sixty years into the computer revolution we’d have that one cracked by now.

I’m going to spend my retirement learning Smalltalk (only 25 years to go!). I’m willing to bet that Smalltalk will still be state of the art even then. My geek heaven would be communing with a Sun workstation and Smalltalk in a cave somewhere with occasional infidelity with Lisp. A cave with broadband though 😉