End-User Programming by Alan Kay (1991)

okay so next next year will actually be

the what I consider to be the 30th anniversary of this endeavor which is

called end-user programming and this talk today is sort of it's different

from the many talks that are that are given at Apple and elsewhere because

most talks are given about minor successes and what I'd like to do is

talk to you about a major failure and that it is a failure that has spun off

absolutely major successes but it is

never converged on its main objective

which is to get end-users to be able to

work build things aspire to build things

on the same kind of level that professional programmers build them and

the reason I'm saying it that way is that when we teach somebody to write in

English we don't say you'll only pass at

this endeavor if you wind up writing a Shakespearean sonnet or a play that is

we have levels of what it means to be literate in reading and writing but the

language that we try and teach people to use and to teach people to write is the

same language that the great artists use

likewise when we teach people to paint or teach people on a musical instrument

we're generally best off if we are using the same kind of musical instrument that

somebody great also uses the so that the

idea is that the end users should be able to aspire to the kinds of things

that they find in their environment in

the case of the Macintosh it means that the end users should be able to aspire

to the kinds of things that they see on the Mac every day that they go out and buy it in

King's software they may not ever want to put themselves in the position of

having to build one of those things with the kinds of smaller things that they

build should be built sort of out of the same kinds of building blocks that they

think these other applications are built

like and I guess I'd like to start off with what I consider to be the prime

theorem of all of this work and that is

that the end users are not like us and

this is a sort of a bell curve theory of life which says that in any endeavor and

a population say about this size that 3

to 5 percent in that population will be fairly well pre-wired for learning

whatever it is it's gonna be a different 5% for each different kind of thing and

only a few exceptional people are pre-wired for lots of things but you

know some people have terrific control over their body and can learn a new

physical coordination fairly easily and

reason I put it in a bell curves not because I believe in normal distributions but it's sort of a way of

contrasting the way social scientists

think of human beings with observations

and I sort of split it up that instead of worrying about the six standard

deviations that these bell curves are wide I just think of it as 5% 85 and 10

and that most of the endeavor in any

kind of learning environment is actually

devoted to doing something with the 85 the ID 5% are the ones who have enough

precursors to build structures that the

knowledge can be fit into they are the ones that go somewhere to learn a method

or a technique and the kinds of fact

this is my second question is how many people presume everybody in this room is a

professional programmer is that true anybody here not a professional

programmer okay a couple of people so of the professional programmers how many

people here felt that they had any great difficulty in learning how to program

honestly anything not just learning a

language no learning Pascal learning C learning machine code APL let's just

take let's just take the garden-variety one so and I followed that category to

none of us had any particular difficulty doing that you know there was there are

some things we had to learn there are lots of things that we had to learn and we sometimes founded a wrench to go from

one language to another my own personal experience I started programming in 1961

and I found that the first 5 or 6 machine codes that I learned interfered

with each other but after that there wasn't any interference because I soon realized that the the objective of

programming was not to remember machine codes but to remember other things that

you program in terms of and then you just find the way the Machine does those

things and that's sort of the transition from a beginner intermediate to an

expert as we'll see later the one of the major difference between experts

regardless of what the field is according to cognitive psychologists and

people who are not experts is that the experts have somewhere between 10,000

and 50,000 what you might call cliches

there are things that are independent of the actual building blocks and there are

little things like arches and other kinds of structures that are somewhat

abstract like an example that's been identified of the many that have been

identified in programming is that is

very simple one of the ten thousand is the cliche called summing the elements

of an array right that's an idea that we actually have and each programming

language has a different way of doing it but when we're faced with some sort of

problem we're trying to solve start mapping I claim and this is borne

out by experiment that we start mapping that problem into the sum of the 10,000

things that we have absorbed and that gives us a way of doing planning one of

the major distinctions between expert planning and novice planning is that

knossos plan when they do plan with the bricks they try and make plans in terms

of the bricks and experts almost never do okay and you can imagine the

difference in outreach by being able to plan with stuff that you already have

inside of you and having to plan with something that is number one to

primitive and number two is something you haven't learned yet it's still in some manual somewhere and so you're in

this spidery fragile place that characterizes the the novice now one way

of interpreting this is this is an elitist way of looking at humanity and

in fact there was once a theory that

only certain people were ever to be found in the 5% that's more of an

elitist theory this notion of the aristocracy and that this being in this

five percent was always genetic and and so forth but in fact by letting it hit

different people in different populations it actually becomes a different kind of theory I call it a

Jeffersonian theory because Jefferson's notion of democracy was as he said if

the people do not yet have the discretion to make the decisions that

they need then what we should do is better inform their discretion rather

than withholding the franchise okay and so what Everson said along with lots of

other people like Suzuki who thinks that you don't have to have being here in

order to learn how to play the violin and has proved it with millions of counter examples that the of much more

than a majority of the people for any given thing actually have enough stuff

set up so that they can build the layer that is required to build a next layer

we'll get them up to a very high level so this is an improvable theory of life

rather than an elitist theory it is

impossible to deny the existence of this no matter how Democratic you want to be

tough beans this is this is here and you

can pick them out in any crowd and the way they do things is different and they

do things differently from the word go even when they have not seen the subject

matter before and the reason in fact there's some very good

beca's Jim spore here I just like to

recommend his book that he wrote with Eliot solloway which is a collection of

papers on novice programming it has

probably 90% of the really good stuff

that's ever been published by cognitive psychologists in studying this whole

area and as well as we get into some of this some of this stuff will see that

some of the things that work really well with the 85% actually hurt these people

because these people actually come to the scene with some already some schemas

that don't specifically have to do with the area but somehow are much more

adaptable to the area than these people there's a way of finding these people

ahead of time there are certain kinds of tests you can give to find them ahead of time and some tests have been done with

them the other thing I should mention

about this talk when I first agreed to do it which is a long time ago I've

canceled out several times I was originally going to do it talking about

playground but since then I wound up being a being a manager of a couple of

projects manager of the vivarium now and I started up a couple of new projects

and I've been very busy and doing a

presentation on playground got less and less interesting and I still I found out

I was still as interested in end-user programming as I ever was so I decided I

would do it on this and that this is the last year that we're actually going to

make any changes to playground so it's essentially being we're not

going to kill it so much the teachers are still going to use it in the classroom but we're going to try and do

something better and different so I thought it would be good at the end of

the spring or so to have a joint presentation on playground because a lot

of what makes playground work is actually the work of Scott Wallace and

Marian and Dave Mintz so actually four of us that did it I thought it'd be nice

to have a session just on yet and I

didn't want to go through a history of all the things that have been done in

the past but boy let's see maybe I'll

just do it like this and let you scan it I by my count there been somewhere

between 30 and 40 programming systems

specifically aimed at end users in various ways this is by no means an

enumeration of them and this is by no means all the different types they are I

just picked what is it ten different types that characterize some of these

and some of them are in more than one type of course 62 was the year that two

of the best ones that were ever done was done this is why it's so poignant

because that's 29 years ago now jaws

which is probably I'm going to show you

last year right before he died I got the

jaws movie from cliff Shaw is the guy

who did Joss single-handedly and we was so faded and stuff we went and got it

color corrected and stuff anybody wants a copy of it can have it but this is

this movie was made in 1964 okay the I'm

only going to show you a part of it because I think you'll find it interesting I want to contrast the two two ways of

doing things that people started working on back then and the reason they were

working on it is because the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1960 said

you know the destiny of the computer is to become a symbiote a complementary partner for humans they

didn't know what that meant McCarthy thought it meant that you should have an intelligent agent that was going to that

he called the advice taker other people thought it would be something more like

a tool so this notion of tool and agent and of course the tools are easier to do

than the agents so the tools started appearing first let me let me show you a tool it's called jaws history of this it

was done on a computer that I think that was built in 1952 maybe earlier it was

one of the Princeton type computers this was one was called johniac because it

was John von Neumann was one of the designers of it and I will not describe

that machine to you except to say it was much larger than this room and it was

astoundingly slow had almost no order

set and they were gonna throw it away

in 1959 1960 and cliff Shaw said well if

you're gonna throw it away let me have it I'll do something on it and this is what

he did a system called jaws for johniac open-shop system this is one of the very

first interactive systems ever done and

when you see it you'll be amazed at what they what they decided to do instead of

using teletypes they decided to adapt IBM electric typewriters so in fact you

type two jaws in green it would type back to you in black undrilled fan-fold

paper so it would go into your notebook in upper and lower case okay and the

user interface on this system and the systems that followed it were done about

as well as it can be done jaws invented remember basic came along

a little bit later and basic was a simulated Fortran when it first came

about in basic you didn't interact with it you submit you interacted with the

editor and you're what you were doing was the editor was a simulated key punch

and you fed simulated cards as data to

your basic program so this is like kiddy Fortran at Dartmouth and jaws earlier

invented this idea that oh you should be able to have direct and indirect interaction so a direct thing is just

saying three plus four and Joss would execute it but if you put a line number in front of it then Joss

would defer execution of that line number something we associate with basic

and APL but Joss invented it just invented it better as people have often

said Joss was an improvement on its successors why did invent it better

because Joss the Joss people were smart enough to realize that the line numbers

should be floating-point numbers so you could always put things in between

something that nobody in basic or APL ever thought of ever okay so this is

just the end of it I'm skipping the introduction because I think everybody will understand what's going on right

from the word go I haven't tested this out yet so I'm presuming it's all set up

and working is that a good supposition

turn off the talent in preparing for

when it's worked for the unforce brand officers frequently have the problem of

evaluating an expression for a number of values to aid in the preparation of a

graph here is one such expression let's

do it Josh you'll start on a page with a

heading

step one point three little valley with our warm it up well for values of T any

one seventy two forty five and nine

and 4l peak to the point line here we

can backspace strike over and go on for

L equal to point one point two in steps of point two up to - Part 3 if anyways

our expression and type out the answers

this is WYSIWYG as far as the required

to convert degrees to radians and to

convert logs to base e to base 10 then

we can ask jaws to the result

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

again we'll keep a record of our program before we delete it

jobs could operate with indexed variables and the stored program may

call for values of variables to be entered during execution will vary the

value of the first index X from 1 in

steps of 1 to Y

and very the index lie from one steps of

1 to 8 we enter the value of each

variable evidence requested by jobs

[Laughter]

when all of these values have been entered we may proceed to have jaws

calculated in mr. Abel as will be required for problems more complex than

we have been able to demonstrate here

[Laughter]

you have just seen a demonstration of many features of the Java system has

pointed out this is an experimental system designed to provide individual

scientists and engineers with a personal on-demand computing service as a side

aspect of the experiment we hope to gain insight into the interface problem

between a man and a computer the system shown here is currently available to

rands professional staff our experience in

using just our observations of user behavior will be the basis on which to

continue research later model systems will certainly differ from what you have

seen John is one of many current efforts in online time shared use of computers

the goal of the Java project has been to demonstrate that the ability to be

online mr. computer given a reasonable language and almost continuous

interaction leads to a powerful computational tool it is probably too

early to forecast the ultimate effect of such systems but for a certain class of

problems at least the programmer as the middleman

problem and the machine is no longer needed jos represents to be believed a

significant step forward because of an intimate interaction between man and

machine this sista i just want to say a

personal note that this is one of the few systems i've ever used in my life in

which the knowledge that you're going to get to use it in the afternoon set up a

pleasant little tingling in you that of

anticipation that i mean i can't begin to describe how beautifully everything

was finished off and cliff Shaw's paper

which some of you may be interested it was written and I think the 63 or 64

joint computer conference thing said the important thing in these systems is just

in just the details the hundreds and hundreds of little details that you have

to do and when and this was a system that users came back to and came back to

they just loved it so much so that was

Josh and that was one way of doing it might wonder why it didn't Joss make it

and basic didn't well it was one of those awful stories that GE decided to

do a network later on in the 60s and

looking around for something to run on that network they went to every place in

the country that had a GE computer and looked to see what was running on it and

guess what place had a GE computer Dartmouth Joss was not implemented on a

GE computer and so GE took what was running on the Dartmouth time-sharing

system and made that the basis of its network called Datanet 50 and that is

why and the only reason why basic came around and then of course Bill Gates

whose taste whatever whatever taste he

has must be mostly in his mouth

decided to resurrect the language that

had been safely dead for a few years and that will never get rid of it okay so

let me show you another system that was done in exactly the same time for

contrast this is sketchpad

so this was done by the way also on a computer actually a computer almost the

size of this floor has Ivan said once it was one of the last truly large

computers in the United States it was it was certainly the last computer to have

its own roof and also actually one of

the great architectural designs call the

tx2 to hear sketchpad this is the first

known sketchpad movie around nineteen

summer 1962 so he's pointing to those things and now

he's going to say make all of those angles right angles and sketchpad just

figured out how to do that so sketch pad this is the first system

that ever had a window and in fact the virtual on this very first graphic

system the virtual sheet of paper he's writing on is 1/3 of a mile on a side

windowed he says make these guys

parallel and now he's going to go in and

- the lines

so this is the system this is the first or at least I guess one of the first two

object-oriented software systems by the

way there no there's no line drawing on this display the tx2 is putting up a

point it actually has a word of memory for each point on the screen okay but

continuous zoom try doing that on a Mac think about what you're seeing here

remember this is the number one so he

wants to make a rivet again the reason it's called sketchpad is because the

idea is you should show sort of what you want and give the the rules and

sketchpad should complete it so use the center of the those cross guys to be the

center of the circle now he's going to go again and say make those guys I just

pointed to mutually at right angles and sketchpad in solving that also forces

the rivet to be symmetric and in fact he

could have made the ratios of the sides obey some rule as well once asked Ivan

how could you possibly in one year done

the first computer graphics system the first object-oriented software system and the first constraint based problem

solving system and he said well I didn't know it was hard so the system is quite

remarkable in that on any system even up

to a $200,000 workstation you cannot buy a system that has this kind of

interaction and problem-solving ability this is after 30 years he's continuously

changing the size of the rivet to size it in there and now he's going to anchor

it in there and by the way he that

drawing of a rivet was what we call a class nowadays that Ivan called a master

so he could make lots of different rivets here's another instance here's

another one this is why they decided to do better

displays but now look what happened he's

gone back to the master of the instance and he's going to make the cross pieces

invisible and in the drawing all of the

instances have felt that change and you can't do that in Mack draw for Christ's

sakes and in fact this drawing that he's

doing here is a master itself he's going to zoom in on it

it's a master so he can make instances of it

and again this composite structure will feel any changes made to its master and

so on ad infinitum fact even more

sobering is that in that first film I

haven't been able to run down a film and Ivan doesn't seem to have won either that showed how you dealt with how you

actually made up the constraints and attach them so I have here an excerpt

from the one of the sketchpad papers and

in fact the fact may be let me do this

one first so these little guys this is the this is

the object that he's drawn and truly

amazingly in sketchpad Ivan decided to make the constraints graphical objects

as well they had a class called constraint and each instance of them was

shown as an icon okay so this is also the first iconic programming system I'll

tell you to me and what an icon is is a symbol in which something about the

visible form of the symbol tells you in an analogical fashion about what it's

supposed to do or you could say in a metaphorical fashion and so the

constraints and sketchpad are like little spiders each arm of them reaches

out to a parameter right so the the

equal guy here has sort of two double

arms because equal applies to in this case applies to lines so this equal

constraint is saying I want this guy to

be equal in size to this guy okay and

that's what he does is he yeah this is a master definition he copies the

definition he connects the definition up

to the picture they merged together and as they merge together if contain

constraints are satisfied and that forces the P guy is a

parallel guys that forces these two guys to be parallel this guy forces them to be equal which

forces the rest of the structure turn out right so so sketchpad and you can

make up new ones of these you want you

just didn't have a fixed set of constraints you could take the

constraints that were there and build new ones and those would be a class of

new constraints that you could then go out and apply it to pictures pretty

nifty huh so this is why old farts II get really pissed off after all this

time that we haven't actually qualitatively been able to go beyond

this in fact in some cases we haven't even been able to do as good this is a

long time and I'm including myself in the thing was I've been working for years trying to do something that will

actually get over the threshold for the end user all right so the other the

other thing that is an important point in this talk is that neither just nor

sketchpad got above the threshold for the end user no matter how wonderful

they seemed to us why that's why because

the users are not like us and in fact if you ever wondered about it think of how

many people are who program what percentage of programmers do you think

have ever designed a programming language right maybe one in 10,000

probably less than that how many programmers have ever designed a new user interface idea right one in

100,000 so in fact even when we're design one der why is MPW so bad okay

the reason is is that the people who design it even though they were designing for professional programmers

they were a different kind of person than the programmers that they were

designing it for so no wonder they couldn't design it for these other people because they thought the other

people were like them this comes back and back I mean the Mac right now has an

absurd set of barnacles on it right it

is no longer use they're friendly like it used to be you think it is no way try

it out on almost anybody who hasn't seen it before and let them try and

find out the chooser for themselves let them try and figure out what it means

that when you close the chooser if there's a perceptible lag between the

time that it closes the actual window and before that it blinks out the thing

that you've just selected but what does the end user do they go back and

reselect the chooser to see if it really did select the printer you know this is

in the company that is supposed to be making its money on user interface and

we actually are willing to sell that and we're willing to sell it regardless of

complaints to the contrary to saying why can't you just blink them out at the

same time so what's the purpose of this

talk purpose of this talk I can't give you a solution for this but I don't want

to give a presentation either what I want to do is to have something that ranges between a dialogue and an

argument about this stuff the only rule

on arguments as you have to back you can't just complain you have to back up

your complaint but as far as otherwise

in my opinion everything else goes let me show you another system from 1963

Ivan's brother Burt who in fact is known

as brother Burt did this system which is

called sometimes called OGG shop for

online graphical specification procedures and Burt's idea Burt had done

some hardware design he thought well here's another way of dealing with the end-user let's let the end-user wire up where the

values are going to go okay and this set up a whole class of data flow type

languages of which one of the best ones that's ever been done was done here at

Apple a few years ago called fabric okay and so the idea is you have function

boxes the information flows so the what

this thing is showing you with the connectivity is where values are going to go so it has the advantage of being

variable free and in fact these systems are generally fairly easy to program

fairly difficult to deal with once they are

one tends to forget what even oneself did a few weeks later and looking at

somebody else's can often be a nightmare there's a reason for that which we can

talk about later when I start talking about the site some of the psychological aspects okay let me get my where's that

slide I just had oh they'll thank you

that's the one I was looking for okay so

English like things Joss and HyperCard

actually are rather close basic had some

English like aspects to it but Joss actually went so far as to require you

to capital they wanted you to think in terms of sentence so you actually capitalized the first words and Joss and

you put a period at the end and it tried

to make the stuff very readable APL is sort of math like next system I want to

show you is sort of a control throw flow way of doing it which the first great

system to do that was Grail and you'll

show you two excerpts first just to give

you an idea what Grail was story behind this is the the main claim about Joss at

Rand was that a lot of the end users who wanted to use the thing didn't know how

to type and the pressure from this caused Tom Ellis and a couple of other

people to invent the first really great tablet which was emitted in 1964 the

same year that the mouse was invented by Engelbart and Bill English and this

tablet was an incredible thing even by today's standards except it's price was

quite unusual this could give you about a hundred points a

second at a resolution of more than a hundred to the inch and it was about

like this and cost about eighteen thousand dollars to buy one round

1967-1968 okay and here's nineteen sixty

five the first really great hand character recognizer you might compare

this if you've seen the go systems version of this stuff take a look at

this system sorry

this list of processes takes us back to the topple stone where we may start to

edit the flow diagram so there's no keyboard so CZ wants a box and it makes

one now it's recognizing as printing this is

where modern-day window control came from literally a decision elements to

the box and came from it to scale

we then erased the florals attached to the process and new areas and move the

box to a new position this allows us to

draw a new box then chop off his corner

and label it sub scan [Applause]

with the residual error now notice it's modeless misses the an he sees it he

hesitates but he says I'll just complete it because I don't have to go into any

mode okay so that was grail now that was

about 1968 and one of the one of the

great experiences I ever had in my life was to use that system for about a half

an hour's about all that would stay up between crashes okay now let's take a

look at now Grail is actually an end user language it was actually a simulation language and here's an

example it is the process that we call

the pseudo random integers because the process has been predefined in this file

when we press on the translation display appears to be filled in in this case the

translation is quite simple and requires just two crackers to return to the

diagram we press return and drawing too

soon element on a random wavelet drawing

little connector and nullify it to represent a switch control planes can

land to the switch label a switch with a name and a variable subscript to provide

a terminal for each value of the subs we draw a trail or connectors and label

each with the same name as the control switch and subscript each with a numeric

value from 0 to 7

to simplify the problem we draw another remote connector and label it then

gather all of the control paths into

this is tedious as the fighter note that

this connector has no control point

to close the loop we draw another remote connector give it the same label as the

collection point and draw an arrow from it to rent before we can simulate the

process we must assign space and values

to data variables when we printed the switch subscript or entered a label on

the interface display our used data labels on the coaming form each was

stored away to be presented on this display that's the seed for the random

number generator thought he did yeah

exactly this is this is yeah this is what they

actually wrote the operating system for this machine in this system notice it

has as a speedometer up there it takes

you through everything

we will stop the simulation a nuisance

okay so that was grail well it's this

machine I believe was about all of these

all of these systems were programmed on machines were about like 512 K max and

it takes two for sketchpad was about 512 K and it was about to say his speed as a

512 K Mac and this machine was a was a

model 40 with a they built all their own displays and stuff herself was sort of a

kludge duck display system all single user of course so it's about about that

I mean that's the main thing is they could actually program back then so it

was it was different they didn't have to wallow in bytes in order to get things

done that hand character recognizer has

been available in a paper since around 1965 and anybody who does the strange

thing called reading papers could actually go back and look at it and

implement it what's interesting is that the things like the go system are

actually not even as good as the Laveen recognizer which is in the back of

Sproul and Newman's book which is about it like a five page program in basic or

C or something like that so this is a typical example of Silicon Valley trying

to roll their own and coming up with that new kind of wheel that has about 15

corners on it and this is really a serious problem I'm I am get very

exercised when I see people doing stuff worse than was done 30 years ago

especially when there's documentation that anybody could read so you can least

start from where some of these characters left off you know you think we're doing better

now than we did back then no we aren't we aren't doing better now they one of

the reasons they were able to do so well is you couldn't make money at this back then

the people who did this did it because they loved it and they they believed in

this dream that the computer could actually be something wonderful for people they cost millions of dollars to

do these experiments and they had to get people who are willing to put millions not $3,000 for makka FX or 10,000 for a

mac FX but millions of dollars to do one of these systems in a form that could

never be commercialized that was what it was like back then there's my old fart

part of the lecture ok another system

I'd like you to look at is I think it's

this now in fact we were very so this is

the one of the original movies of the old Dynabook model and

we were very interested in seeing what

end-users could do let me show you what

one of our child and users could do in

an object-oriented language object orientation as I say it existed in

sketchpad existed in Simula never been

used in a direct form for end-users until some of the Flex machine stuff and

then most especially the small talk stuff and see what not quite sure where

I am on this tape okay so here's so this

is something like Mac draw it's a twelve

year old girl

[Music]

the system is tight general and allow five sizes and colors to change that

will many instances can be created from

the shape description she is betting to build a truck the idea

of a system to a drawing is something every child understands intuitively because they already know about drawing

the school in order to design and build

the system however Susan had to gain a fairly deep symbolic understanding of

some of the semantics of drawing even more until she has time to grasp the

very powerful notions which have something to do with inventing comprehensive models that not only

capture her desires and ideas but which also rock

okay so that now I won't show this one

just in the interest of time so we had some successes at that and I'd

characterize part of this success we had is because there was a fair amount of

what you might call pre modeling with the kids I'll give you an example of

this is stuff that was worked out by

Adelle and some of the rest of us trying

to figure out how do you get kids to do

something besides just make pretty patterns on the screen the way they do in logo because one of the one of the

biggest problems is the limited success

or success in a limited area is probably one of the biggest barriers to getting

major success you know it's the local mini minimum problem and one of things

that was discovered although much after the fact was that the kids who did learn

logo before logo had a turtle did much more interesting programs they were

doing list processing of things like turning English sentences into pig latin

sentences or it into french sentences where they actually had to use recursions and parameters and stuff

whereas with the logo turtle you can actually do fairly elaborate effects on the screen just by long strings of four

words and less so there's a real tendency for the kids to sit there

rather than taking on the bigger structures in fact we discovered that because the first way we taught small

talk to kids was in the form of turtle

geometry because we didn't know what else to do so adele started thinking

about how could you teach objects to the

kids so she gave the kids a program called box and they typed something like

Joe gets box new and a box would appear

on the screen and the they could then say Joe grow and Joe turn 15 and the

boxes would obey these messages that were sent to it

and she you could get another box called Jill so you had two instances of them

you can make Jill go one way and Jo go the other way and then she would get the

kids to try and guess the interior of box what what were these box and they

had they'd exit they had actually exercised the thing enough to know that

that there are these I apologize for the

size of this that there are these commands that there was a a turn command

a move command a grow can may actually

there wasn't a move command in it there is a draw undraw redraw turn and grow

and so forth and they write down sort of

an English description of what they thought was actually going on and then

after they done that we would show them much to their horror what was actually

there and it was in terms of the turtle

each one of these in this particular way of doing it each of these instances

owned its own turtle and so when you said turn it would say something like

actually this is this is a fancier version that Dan did it would say

something like selfie race changed my

internal angle to the new angle and then self draw so that it was fairly theirs

so there's three little sentences for each one of these things and then they

would the next thing they would do is to

make a plan to add a move here's one

version of move

sort of the way we did of getting the kids to write the English before they

worked on the small talk so they put an English description of their intention

and then they would do they would say

self on draw placed the turtle at some new place and then say self draw so

that's an analogy to the things that were already there and that was one of

the things that led us to be interested in sub classing because we thought that

the getting something that had superclass's would actually help the

fledgling programmer by providing metaphors that would help them in their

planning turned out not to be the case in fact super classes are very hard even

for professional programmers to deal with anybody know why anybody have a

sense anybody ever tried doing something in sub classing something in small talk

somebody must have an opinion yeah what

what is the superclass mean right you can't even be sure that the word print

means what it's supposed to mean because small talk doesn't enforce any external

meaning of it so we actually have to go read the superclass code to try and

figure out what it does and it's not in a particularly readable form so the next

thing the kids kids would do is in this move plan they would one of the things

they might do is to leave out the undraw so now the box would leave a trail

another thing they could do is to hook up the parameters of where the move to

is to the mouse and they could drag the box around leaving a trail now and they

would have a little painting program and a little painting power Graham was the

basis for this system that was twelve twelve year old girl did okay that

system by the way that the twelve year old did would be quite a challenge in HyperCard because hypercar isn't really

an object-oriented language and you are without having something like

independent objects that you can deal with after you've made them it is impossible to go back and recent you

know think of what you have to do hypercard to simulate object-oriented graphics right you actually have to have

another card where you're making the drawings on and then you're swapping

images and yep you're forcing the end user to actually do double buffered

graphics which is a little silly okay so

that was a small talk we talked about

data flow pattern matching just like snowball and but G was a graphical

language to do that they've been rule-based languages like Rita which is

called another one done it ran call which is called a Rand intelligent terminal agent

which is basically a pattern matching

system for allowing the end user when the end user came up to another database

that the end user wanted to deal with the end user supposedly was able to

write some rules in it that described the new database and Rita would merge

this database into the user interface that the end user used for all databases

turned out not to work so well but they learned a lot about rule based program

so what's happened along the way of doing this stuff is that almost every

one of these systems has led to an advanced in the world of the programmer

but the end users still can't really do

what they need to do that's the paradox that's why it's so frustrating every

time we do something here it spills out really nicely into professional

programmer world but we it's somehow we can't quite get past the barrier that

the users aren't like us actually we have Alan warning here Alan want you

raise your hand Alan did the best follow-on to sketchpad

which is called thing lab and actually we have Dan Ingalls here who is the

architect Dan which raise your hand who is the major architect of small talk

over the many years so I bited them along because I figured if nobody else

here would argue with me they probably would by demonstration programming by

demonstration one of the first really good examples of that was Pygmalion have

Dave Smith here see this is raise your hand

so what's frustrating about this we have all these great people working for Apple

and we still can't solve this goddamn problem so Pygmalion is maybe a better

[Applause] Pygmalion I still think is one of the

best ideas this is one of these systems that deserves to be done again because

basic notion of this one is if you could capture what one programmer would

explain to another when trying to explain an algorithm at the blackboard

the programmer goes up there and draws some pictures of data structures and say well first you do the basically showing

editing level at it of how you go from the raw ingredients to how you get your

results and you capture that you would capture a lot of the useful parts of an

algorithm without having to know a lot of the grungy terms and it in turn was

based on some of the ideas of WYSIWYG

editing that as they've put in his thesis people rarely make a an egregious

error in a WYSIWYG text editor and the

reason is because they're making the change right where they're looking and they can see whether the change was the

one that they wanted or not so they're right there there's not this huge delay

between seeing the change Radia Perlman had taught turtle

programming to very young children by using a button box in which the turtle

always acted out what it was going to do even when it was was when it was

remembering and what's nice about in

there are two ways you can go on a programming by demonstration system one

way to go is to try and have some AI to try and figure out what the intent of

the demonstration is we even have some

systems that are being worked on on here Allen cipher and some other people are working on them I think this is a very

hard problem and the reason is that I believe that in order to figure out the

intent in any reasonable domain for programming that you have to have

something like psych and you have to have a model of the 10,000 or 15,000

people's the things that people generally want to do you have to have some way of figuring

out what the goal is and if you don't

have a way of understanding of homing in quickly on the goal the possibilities

for misunderstanding what the intent is is tremendous just as this happens when you're dealing

with another person who thinks in a different way I think the other way to

do it was something that was done by dave student dan hilbert in a system

called small star which is sort of the i think of as the granddaddy of direct

manipulation programming by demonstration systems in which what he

did is he tried to collect a transcript you know we would call it a macro today

but to collect the macro in such a way that the form of the macro was

meaningful in higher-level terms rather than low-level terms the way most macros

are today and then you could go to that thing and be able to edit it into the

level of generality that you're really trying to understand and I happen to

believe that that is the best way in the next five years to solve this problem I

do not believe that AI is going to get enough there and a little bit of AI is

almost worse than none at all because it can actually get the user into a place

where he's trying to outguess some system that can't guess what he's trying to do okay so let me talk about a few

psychological ideas and some studies that have been done that are sort of a

basis for us the first one is the one that gave rise to the Macintosh and next

month we're actually going to give Jerome Bruner a Mac for coming up with

what I think of as the main psychological basis for the design of

the Mac and it's a multiple mentality way of looking at things

he called them in active mentalities iconic and solid mentalities the slogan

I made up was doing with images make symbols and weight and way you think of

them in a more visual form is

as in childhood development as three

separate mental centers that all the deal with the world in a different way that mature at different rates and think

about things in different ways we've had our greatest success in dealing with end

users in retreating from the symbolic way of doing things down here and the

real question about the Macintosh is have we actually been helping the

problem know how we've been winning the battle and losing the war because the

central thing that you must be able to do in programming is go from the

concrete to the abstract and we've been seeing in a lot of our work at the

school that the Mac actually seems to be interfering with the kids ability to do

abstract thinking not helping we'll talk about that a little bit here's some

psychological studies there's quite a bit of this stuff has been done and the

first caveat is sort of epitomized by lead guards work is a classic study that

showed that end users preferred English as a command language for text editing

rather than command keys he did that at

the exact same time that people were

doing WYSIWYG editors at Parc okay so this is the this is the optimizing the

Train theory of transportation rather than venting the airplane so he took a

bad area and found out what the best thing to do in the bad area was another

important notion is the distinction between what Brownell and Moser in 1949

called mechanical learning which is being shown of parallelogram and being

told that the area is the height time the base versus what we used to call it

Park behold things the behold thing is a

meaningful learning where there's something in what's being presented that

illustrates why it works and the simplest be hold on this is to show that

you can take a little piece of triangle from here and move it down here and it becomes a rectangle and therefore it has

to be height times base so it's a

difference between okay quickly now this notion of advanced

organizer is a good idea the advanced

organizer is like if you're going to read something in encyclopedia britannica read read the article in the

world book first this is a good one for kids that gives you a map and you can

take care of the much more complicated information much better the Mac should

be an advanced organizer for end user programming everybody agree with that

because it's got all of these metaphors there and you're doing the easy thing a

reading from it in a sense and it should be organizing the knowledge that you need to put together for end users

Gagne showed that putting things in your own words slows

but it advances transfer so if you want

people to take something that they've learned and apply it in a new situation it helps to have them articulate even

though it delays the learning process itself labels these are like simple

things right but it's incredibly important a label on a paragraph will

help the comprehension of the paragraph by about a factor of three most people

can't figure out what a paragraph is about unless they've been told here's

one that Steve wire and Alex Canara did a long time ago which is to give the end

users a concrete machine model where Steve Steve's around here somewhere okay

well he lost his chance at fame

the stuff that Adele and I and some other people did use pre-training

prototypes giving the kid a plateau to

stay on for a long time planning templates Atwood and Ramsey did the

first really comprehensive study that showed how many schemas that experts

have in programming and show that they are very very similar to the schemers

that musicians and chess players and athletes and so forth have one of the

great papers I don't remember the date was done by Perkins and a group at

Harvard character yeah they were they

thought it was in an in excess of 10,000 for programming it didn't seem to be up

in the 50,000 of the chess master but it was in excess of 10,000 they thought no

no the the presence of yeah the numbers of them the number of chunking entities

there are also personal styles that interfere some people are what called

are what I call Stoppers and other people are called movers and the stopper

is a person that when they get into a difficulty they stop okay and the movers

keep moving sort of difference between depression and anxiety right it's it's

always it's always better to be anxious because

you're moving at least and the problem

is the extreme cases actually are almost as we're as bad off the movers many

times we'll just take her randomly in order to be moving but they won't sit

down and do any more thinking than the stoppers do so one of the one of the key

things that you have to do and this is a serious problem is that you have to have

something like the Mac puts a lot of effort into extending the short-term

memory of the user onto the screen in order to prevent stoppers from getting

stopped right there's always a pulldown you can this is why the pull downs work

better than pop-ups because it's hard for a stopper to remember that the

pop-up is there it's invisible they have to actually do something whereas just

scanning around and so that at least there's a line of menu they can go and

fiddle with it to get going

close tracking of code I'm actually leading up to something here which is a

problem with this area is that see the reason nobody solved it in 30 years it's

actually complex I apologize for that it's actually a hard problem as I said

in the beginning close tracking of code close tracking of code means that the

user pays attention to the very code that they've actually put in the machine

most users do not we've seen this everyday at the school is that the kids

will put code in and never read it again even though it's in front of their face

they will not look at what they do tinkering we've just talked about is

going in and making a change somewhere because that sometimes that has worked

once right go in someplace and suspicious make a change and they will

do it forever most users won't break problems into subproblems because that

isn't solving the problem now the reason

I want to reason I'm emphasizing this stuff is what is astounding to me about

this stuff is that does not matter how old the person is for this to be true

these studies have been done from kids starting with age four and five they've

been done with ell entry school middle school high school college

lots of Yale students suffered through this it seems to be almost universal

that these are the problems that you have to work with here's another one

that solloway and spore and some other people did novices will write this is

almost a no-brainer but it's an interesting one novice will write better programs if the

primitives of the language fit their preferred strategy and it's hard to

believe for instance an example that

since it makes a difference between saying this

and saying this

doesn't seem that difference to us but makes a huge difference if a difference

between the normal if statement the way we usually see it if a less than B then

a gets a plus B versus saying the action cloth first a gets a plus B if a is less

than B this one is the one that the end users like the end users like saying a

plus B goes to a rather than a gets a

plus B ok because the end users are

basically bottom up they're generating and putting and if you think about the

the other versions of those two things they're both top-down they're putting

the guards first they're delaying

talking about what the action is going to be whereas the end users are in their

best place when they're thinking about what the action is and finally this is

sort of the classic paper by spohrer and solloway yes sorry has a couple of I

think the central important things one

is that a few types of bugs account for most of the errors and here's the capper

most bugs are not misunderstandings of

the language but our composition bugs we

had we taught many third graders this

language we worked on called playground and one of the astounding things about

this experience these are seven and eight-year-olds is to have a class of

sixty children after about a week and a half be able to answer most questions about

how do you do something if correctly if the answer was a single playground limit

of primitive so in a week and a half they'd absorb about 50 or 60 of the damn

things really astoundingly and I think one way we could say we're Scott because

it's see if I could get a nod from him on this that one of the most amazing

things is the Running Start the kids get in playground like the first two

weeks you get 95% of what you're going to get and then actually it retrogrades

but being able to have almost 100%

comprehension on answers that require

single primitives the kids are almost unable to answer any question that

requires any kind of combination of more than one primitive any kind of question

whether it's even a simple secret you do this first and then this or you do this

here and this here any kind of thing that we require is planned composition

that's outside of the bricks of the thing they have no schemas for if you

want to look at it in terms of schemas there are only plans they can do are in

terms of the bricks and the only planning they can do with the bricks are single applications of these bricks what

do you think okay listen if I knew I would be writing the paper right now

yeah the question is when you start

getting into what what you might call con this is where we can start getting

huge content interference like the users can't problem-solve is basically what is

being said here in any form and the difference and this is why the Mac is an

illusion and in a bit because the way we get the users to problem-solve on the

Mac is we give them an environment that they can problem solve in and the

problem with programming I claim the difficulty with programming is the users

haven't ever done that kind of problem solving at all and there's problem

solving that involves something like variables and that there isn't anything

in there Norton ordinary experience where they think of things that terms

and that the Mac actually doesn't get you it only helps in HyperCard to the

extent where you're doing things that don't involve problem solving that involves variables as soon as you go try

and go from the concrete to the abstract and that my claim is it doesn't matter what kind of end-user scheme you're

trying whether it's data flow or any other kind of thing the biggest problem that you have is that is that the end

user doesn't have the schema for doing the abs drak problem-solving forget about how

are you going to realize it here's some

of the problems one of my favorite

psychologist is a guy by the name of Vygotsky who turned out a lot more than

Piaget did in just 10 years he died of pneumonia in the 30s and forgot ski one

of vygotsky's many things did was to study concept formation in children and

it goes through a number of stages first stage is there's a complete separation

between the thing and the symbol the

second stage is there is an ephemeral connection between the thing in the

symbol some some days there's a connection and some days there isn't a connection third thing is the phase that

most people get to and stay at which is there is an indelible Association of the

name with the thing kids think that the that is you know in the sky that there's

a mystical thing called do G that is this thing and in fact the real symbolic

act is not this one but starting to

admit other ways of thinking about dog and the one that we do and scientists do

is the one where we take the symbols away from the thing again and keep them

safely over here to use them just when we use them this is the does everybody

understand what I'm saying this is the hard this is the place that ordinary

experience doesn't get people to well

dogs yen and I think I just made up some

brats some arbitrary thing standing for

God's could mean X but what I'm saying

is is that the it's this sort of freezing on the ordinary language gets

you in pretty good shape by freezing on the association between the thing and

the symbol and in fact the deadly embrace is so tight that is how

for people to relax yes thank you no you

know why they don't give it up you got a theory exactly it's like Necker cube do

you speak more than one language yeah you I know whether you've had this

experience but most people who speak more than one language fluently have the sense of that they're actually thinking

in terms of it and it's one or the other it's like a Necker cube you're in one

order you're in the other and it's it's more than just the words it's actually patterns of thought my wife actually

speaks French very fluently and when she's been in France for a couple of weeks she has some difficulty in getting

the concepts back into English yes yeah

well see the the cop-out which I'm going

to be a cop out on the thing but I think that part of it is the 5% thing part of

it and I think the end part of us are in the 85% who for one reason or another

gradually loosened our hold on the way

our language uses symbols and got us into this this foggy your way

now when way of looking at problem-solving is a lot of it is not

committing to the first idea you have for the solution right and that means

that you see a separation between yourself and your ideas the piaget

problems of the kid with the tall glass of water are that the kid is frozen and

immobilized by the vividness of the visual scene and so where the Middle

Ages but it's it's it's the stepping

back the detachment from the vividness of the senses that starts giving you the

problem-solving stuff

language doesn't solve anything they want to solve yes for instance a lot

more people than 5% use spreadsheets and know how to at least do some simple

spreadsheet calculations and some at other things like that can solve things

that those people financial Iowa's yes problem so these kids they get all the

primitives and there's no problem that they really want to solve with it yeah

yeah well part of the part of the wait when you're doing stuff with children

you actually want to have the problems be something they do want to do and we actually put some effort into making

that the case and can even find out from them that whether they're bored or not

most interesting thing about the playground stop because it was much what

we're doing is more comprehensive than when we're doing small talk is that the

kids love of playground even though they're not learning much after about

the first week and a half they are totally enthusiastic about it

for the whole six weeks or even couple of months and they love it they go to it every day there's they don't complain

you know they only complain when it crashes and it doesn't crash that much this year so they're happy as clams they

love it it's it's satisfying their needs there's a lot of things that they can do

with it but they stay like I say in this level where there are certain things

that it can do and there are other things that are just out of the potential well entirely so the boredom

is not actually the problem well yeah

yeah IRA goldstein at as Mark Miller

here no IRA Goldstein did quite a bit of

work at MIT before he came to park on

schemas that people used for solving adventure games and this is part of the

same general kind of stuff that was been in the 70s that John Seely Brown and

other people have done where you take some area like subtraction and actually

spohrer and solloway did again where you take some problem that you can give to

new people over and over again and you try and extract the schemas from it and you try and build a help system

basically that understands that the

person is making this kind of an error and tries to give them a way of seeing what the what the schema they should

apply is practically though it hasn't worked out because the schema is their

short-term memory is already blown out of the water right so the schema stuff

adds an enormous overload and it's it's

rather it's usually rather abstract so

here's another here's another way of thinking about abstractions so one

abstraction is this notion of a group of things

the next thing is do not worry about what the things are so we have eight

things there and the next thing is we might be able to line them up and

analogize them to length the next thing is we might think of it even as a sort

of trip along a length and then finally

we might wig it all the way down to eight as a as a symbol idea that's

divorced from it doesn't have this this symbol doesn't have any iconic significance okay and when you think

about people learning what eight plus

three is everybody can readily believe why you can learn that 8 plus 3 is 11

but what is difficult is for anybody who learns 8 plus 3 equals 11 to understand

what the significance of plus is because

it's easy to learn number sentences down here but in fact the richness of it is

up here and some of the best thinking that you can do like thinking in science

is done before numbers get down here thinking of science is done in terms of

trips in various spaces ok and so when

you add each one of these things you have a different kind of combination and

a different kind of result even although all of the vertical abstractions always

obtain like I believe that this is one

of the major problems that has to be surmounted because the the power comes

from going lower and yet the the ability to use the concepts comes from staying

high right this is the essential

dichotomy I believe in Indians of programming

query you know they're they're kind of saying the language for kids to do they're you know yeah that was one of

the sirens songs in the 60s it was called problem oriented languages where

you picked a problem space and in fact one of the big urges 12 towards what

were called extensible languages in the 60s was that you should be able to sit down you know if you're a programmer an

Mis Department you should be able to sit down with one of these extensible languages and make up a language and

when people finally succeeded in doing extensible languages that you could do

that in they discovered that there's several things when it was very hard to

get the languages rich enough so that they weren't just kits like you know

reports program generator RPG is one of the famous old early fourth generation

languages not really a language and the other thing is that they could not

exchange code with anybody like Smalltalk 72 was an extensible language

in every way including syntactically because partly because we thought that I

thought that that was still important that was a big idea in the in the 60s

and it turned out to actually be more trouble than it was worth and there's some tactical extension the ability to

create wholly new languages and it was actually taken out when we went to small

talk 76 not to say that it shouldn't be tried again because obviously we don't

know what the answer is but in fact it didn't seem to work the well and in fact

languages that are a lot like English have a big problem is that in people's

expectations about English seriously interfere because English actually is

not a good carrier of meaning right English is not sending a message to

somebody directly it's sending a gesture to a thought cloud that you hope you

share with the other person and the computers don't have much in their thought cloud

so okay so let me let me wind this up by

talking about what's what I think is going to happen in the future and what

and some things that are starting to happen at Apple but I really think this

the whole purpose of this talk is to try and challenge some of the people in the

room to work on this area I personally

think that for apples differentiation in the next five years now that Windows is

encroaching on our turf and so forth

that our biggest differentiation is to be able to deal with the generative side

of direct manipulation to be able to

allow the users to aspire as I say to the kinds of things that they use on the

Mac now here's that here's a Gartner

group slide that seems almost

incomprehensible but let me we put on my

age 50 glasses here and see if I can decipher it basically this this line

here is the worldwide revenues of all multi-user systems that's mainframes and

mini it was about 80 billion in 89 and 89 was

the year that this little curve which is our curve the desktop personal computers

crossed the mainframe curve okay and

from then until now and into the future

the worldwide revenues for desktop computing completely dominate all of the

mainframe stuff in fact the mainframe is

this curve here so it's it's just

slightly better than linear going off into the future for apples planning this

is the area under the curve between 1990 and 1995 is estimated be 650 billion

dollars that is a lot of area

and we should get fact the company

reorganization and the strategies are that we should be able to harvest a lot

of this because we are one of the major creators of this as a this is an area

that's why we have to be worried about what we call paradigm to computing the

computing that we do in the next way of harvesting that area is allowing the end

users to do a lot more than they can now by direct manipulation then the other

thing is that there is this other curve that starting does essentially has no F

doesn't start showing itself really until around 1995 which are what I've

been calling intimate computers you can think of them as the notebook computers

and the Gartner group estimates that the

area under this curve between 1995 in the year 2000 is going to be 525 billion

why is it going to grow so much faster because the intimate computer can reach

everybody right it it is dynamic paper

it's going to be hooked into wireless networking of various kinds and it's

going to be selling for under $1,000 it's not an extension of the laptop into

this world anymore then the desktop is like the

mainframe this is a new whole new thing and so we have this interesting thing

here that Apple could be immensely rich by 1995 and broke by 1997 right this is

one of these important places in this area here is the one what we call p3 and

my belief is that it's going to be p3 and user programming is done by giving

advice to some intelligent agent that figures out how to do it that's what the

end users really want but there's such a gap between when that's going to happen

it might not even happen this decade that I believe that we have to close the

circle to drop the other shoe of the Macintosh and get the end-users

empowered the same way we've empowered them for using applications they have to

be able to build them and change them to me it's one of the most critical

critical problems and so we started on a

little paradigm 2 project called Mac pet

the three things I think need to be put together one of the things ways of

thinking about HyperCard is that it's like the mac paint of end-user programming right Mac paint was not a

great desktop publishing system but people did do page layout on it because

it was the first thing that you could do page layout on then that draw I had a

better metaphor then page maker had much more of the functions and then finally

we have the second generation page layout stuff like this like ready-set-go

that shows this as a sort of a four stage evolution and I think HyperCard

got so much above the threshold of the end users and then stopped short that at

Apple we should do the invention of the equivalent of mac draw for it the more

object-oriented thing that maybe even extends into a little bit of what page

maker is all about so that we can then get the third-party developers to go out

and do a seriously engineered version of these things but the third-party

developers do not do this kind of design we have to do it

nobody else is going to do it

and I think this is just how many people

here have seen pink recently okay

lots of people okay the one of the good

things about pink is the effort to be

much more tactile and kinesthetic of doing lots more user dragging and moving

things around bad thing about pink maybe I shouldn't say the bad thing

the unfortunate thing about pink is that

it isn't going enough beyond the Macintosh in the direct manipulation

area I believe for pink in order for pink to be a successful concept and to

pay its way for changing over it has to solve the end-user programming problem

just because pink is a paradigm too kind of system it's a direct manipulation

system and the only thing really left to be done in direct manipulation that is

qualitatively important is this end user idea how am i doing on time should I

wrap up okay

[Music] okay okay so let me try a scenario out

on you and try and get you to criticize it and because there's such an old fuddy

duddy i keep on going back to some of the friends of the past space war i had

a lot to do with designing small talk and it's a wonderful thing to think of

in terms this is now we're shifting into the kids world when we start first

started working with kids we didn't know that working with kids would help us out

with adults that much because it was before all these studies that showed that the same problems of the end users

were shared by children and high school students and adults and so forth so

space war is just this game first video game invented at MIT in 1961 and the

spaceships floating around and you can blow your friend out of the out of the

sky and what's interesting about it is that it is actually rather easy to

program if you have an object-oriented language easy to program if you can

think of the few conceptual things I'm going to show you they're just a couple

of things that you actually have to think of in order to do this now if you

start thinking about things in terms of s equals VT like they teach you in physics class you're dead right what

does that mean however in computer terms where you have

a dynamic thing going over and over this

translates into something that only has an addition in it take the current

position and add some hop to it so what the computer does by its dynamicism this

actually takes the equations of motion of physics and makes them into

differential equations right even better than differential equations because the

well it basically our differential equations you can think of the deep the

DT is in the clock that ticks you past each thing and that gets you sort of

wonder if ative to nirvana here this is really critical

because the thinking of things in terms of simple additions is infinitely easier

for the end user so let me let me run you through it

here's how you would here's one way to do it with the child you get the child

to draw the draw a car first and then

you start talking about motion and get

the kid to think about moving from one place to another in making hops so here

we're making four hops and we've moved eight away we take physical bins the

open school kids use physical plastic bins for holding things because they

don't have permanent desks and you can

put this is sort of like variables but you can put where you are in the current

position and what the hop is in it you can get kids to change these on each other and see how big a hop they can

make and so it's all a game and so we

have this one simple idea that we're taking the number in position and adding it to the number and hop and then

putting the result back in the position and you can do lots of things right

there now what we want to do is go to

the

[Applause] if I lost it oh well now what we want to

do is to go to the bins that are in the

language for this kid and we want to put a two in the hot bin the way we do it

now here's a question what kind of numbers should you be using I claim like

I like vectors you know the remember I showed you this

so one of the problems with getting down to here is that it's hard for people

they haven't really learned this this is one of the ways of thinking about

numbers so I think thinking about every number as a kind of a trip actually

gives you more of an extension of what the numbers are for so I'm claiming in

this scenario and anybody can argue with me at any point here that what I'm going

to do is pick out a horizontal displacement from my Mac draw like

toolbox I'm going to dump it into hop and when I dump it in there it shows up

as a an arrow sign a displacement number

and some little carrots that I can so I just flick it up to a two and so what

I've got in there is a horizontal

displacement of two and the car is

already at some position and I see that it actually has a horizontal position

displacement of 30 and a vertical displacement of 105 some point

somebody's going to ask me why don't I do this with turtle geometry but I'll

tell you later why so what we do is to

let these backwards maybe they didn't all print out maybe

that's my problem so what we do is Dave Smith style we start moving things

around we put the cursor in the position and it shows up in the code we open up

the position number to find out the

operators that it has it gives us a plus we go to the hop guy it puts this in

here and now it surrounds it with a sort

of a lozenge in gray to show that that's a permissible result that's what we keep

on going because we want to take that result and put it back into position so it generates this kind of an assignment

statement position plus hop goes into position and we can keep on going if we

want but that's where we decide to stop and by adding a clock into this we can

get it to go over and over again and run the and run the car so what we have to

do in all of these games is we have to

take a situation that the child can understand there are several ways we could have done this we could have used

turtle geometry turns out that using turtle geometry prevents the kids from

ever finding out how to do space war

right think about it because you have to

do a kind of addition that turtle geometry doesn't have but this one is

perfectly understandable of what happens you can watch the position changing the

car goes back and forth you can do multiple you do multiple games and and

so forth then you introduce the idea of

looking at various views of this trip object that trip objects can be looked

at in various ways and one way is to

look at them as a horizontal displacement and vertical displacement and this is a more of a an abbreviation

for that another way of looking at them is in polar coordinates but you don't

say polar coordinates two kids the worst thing you can ever do in mathematics with kids is tell them the official

names for things but you get them to act out on the floor

of seeing this is another way of finding this place on the floor it's all done

with their bodies and then there's a as

we all know there's a very sensible way of thinking about what addition means

which is when you add one trip to another one way of actually getting the

answer directly is to see that this this way the two things separately add when

you have the number in this other form it takes you to the right place but it

is not clear exactly what the how you actually do the operation and you can do

them in the other order and get the same answer and so that the idea here is that

what you're building up now is a

collection of ideas completely built around a single notion this is where

who's you you suggested you should have fewer concepts fewer bricks okay fewer

bricks my belief is the same thing is that you should take one like one brick

and find a thousand things to do with it

because that is the way you get from the idea of understanding single instances

of the thing to actually understanding the concept as it projects another way I

would say is the main problem the end users have is that they can understand

the bricks but they can't project them into new situations and it's just

getting so that they can project some brick into a new situation is the is the

biggest barrier does anybody yep some disagreement I hope

because there's about three different things I'm hearing enters one is we want

you end-user skyscraper design okay or

one you end-user dog house design we're going to have a new and improved manual

architecture needs to learn from confused which ones are you advocating

which ones I think that the user I think

it is a mistake to put give the user system that they can't aspire to the

skyscraper in right and the the thing

that I hate I mean just a personal prejudice is I hate giving people a

concept that is in too weak a form so

that doesn't include the larger I'd rather spend a longer amount of time on

the on the powerful idea take months if

necessary to let because to me it's not important whether you know how to add

three and five and get eight you know cuz that that doesn't project yeah well

the question I think I think the question is I mean the end user can design a skyscraper perfectly well on

paper and it's not going to fall down right because the there's nothing

dangerous about the lines on the paper that they've drawn so I think that you

can give I think it deep it if the user has to sit down and and take something

dangerous like see where you can screw

yourself a hundred different ways before you can even turn around and I think there's no I think it's out of the

question but I think that if you can confine the whole one of the things that

you can get out of object-oriented approaches to the things you can confine the errors to a very tiny place

it's what Butler Lampson used to call fail fast is what you don't want is for

an error to happen long after

wiping out your database yeah but I

think that I think that's similar to what you have to do when you start having semi intelligent agents which is

better undo it's like the the agent at

the UNIX agent at Berkeley that somebody said I just ran out of file space I need

some more and 20 seconds later it came back and said ok now you have plenty of

file space that actually happened but

because because if it if that had

happened on a Mac it would have been all over because it deleted about a third of

his files and it it actually got rather high marks for being an AI for doing

that you think of what it had to actually think about in order to figure that out

and but the in that particular case

because it was on a fairly robust time sharing system it had an undelete so

delete didn't mean to lead it just meant mark these files for special treatment doing archiving and I think for any kind

of thing where you extending the franchise of the end user into the whole

file level and stuff like that you have to have infinite undo and other kinds of

things but yeah the real question is and all of these things is whether the end

user can do something interesting before their constructions get too spidery and

one of the hopes for instance in internet was an inheritance was that in

it that inheritance could provide scaffolding done by master programmers

but in fact it's only worked in a limited way because it's been difficult

to understand even what the scaffolding is for the end-users another question

probably have feel free to leave by the way because I know we're running over

yeah oh there's Jim

were you here when I was taking your name in vain they're enjoying them

having fun well I mean our experience is

that's been one of the hardest things for one reason that the the kids this is

why I say I think that the Mac actually provides some interference what I

talking to the kids I found it extremely useful to put a newspaper over the

screen so they can't see it and get them to talk to me in English

about the thing and because we've noticed an enormous disparity between the kids being able to do problem

solving when they're off the machine versus the almost nil amount of problem

solving they can do when they're actually sitting there okay and part of

that is because you know I believe that that would be better if the everything

we were doing was completely iconic they

might be better off than they are now but right now they're they have a play

field that's completely iconic and they're thinking sort of in iconic terms

and they have a programming language that's more symbolic and yet the when

you try and think of iconic versions for all the things that are in the symbols

is very difficult because there are some abstractions involved we're not really

referring to these things we're not really referring to particularly lengths

were referring to general lengths and so forth and what

we'll make pal a lot of students designed for learners who using

well I don't know what if you tell me

what that means I would say yes well

logo does though and the experience with logo has not been encouraging to that

level because the thing that is most opaque to the kids in logo is the is the

abstraction of making a procedure out of something they have the hardest so that

right yeah so there's a question about

maybe there should be something like components you know it's one of the it's

one of the one of the alternatives to this way of doing things is to say well

instead of coming up with something that is like an expression like those of us

that took mathematics Esme maybe what we should have instead is an incrementer

tool you know it's basically a component so it it isn't just a plus it's a thing

whose job it is it remembers what it's trying to increment by and it's it's

actual deployment in the system is whenever you want to bump something up

periodically you get one of these guys and stick it in there so then what you'd have in the code

would be something like you'd have something more like a folder that had

just the the position guy in there and

an increment or guy and that would be the whole code there'd be no assignment statement or anything else because you'd

be doing that that's why I was hoping somebody challenged me on that because that's a

completely different way of looking at it it might be better maybe bring ideas

for problem solving and I'm wondering now

right in fact one of the things you could say is mmm computers are too hot

problem-solving is really cool because it has this there's this detachment

thanks and so question is how can you cool down the Mac when you want one of

the ways of doing it is to make the images not jump around like if you go to over 100 frames per second the images

will steady down like they are on paper if you go to anti raster anti-aliased

graphics on the thing you'll start getting something that is more sketchy

you know the kinds of things you'd normally go to a back of an envelope or

even do it in your head in fact here's an analogy for I think what the problem is the easiest thing to make shapes with

is a ball of clay how many people are tried sculpturing sculpting here with

clay how many people got what they wanted right

why that clay will go wherever you want

it to and you can see it every step of the way you know it's perfectly WYSIWYG

right Dave we'll just go wherever you want you can make it incrementally you

can always see that it's wrong right that's not what I want right it's always

wrong so what do they do in art school do they give the art students a ball of

clay no way they gave them a lump of soap do they give them oil paints no way

they give them watercolor in other words non-reversible media why do they do it

because you have to have an image of some kind in your head it's not it's not

exactly the same as a graphic image but you have to have a very strong image of

what you're going after in order to get something neat to happen no matter how

plastic the medium is see this is the bug I think of the Macintosh is the

Macintosh is a lump of clay you know it

will go where you push it but in fact it doesn't build a strong enough image in

people's head of what the possibilities are and I think the challenge of the use

physical place to quit actually the challenge of the user interface design

of the future is that that it should explicitly build

an image in people's head that is powerful enough to allow them to create as well as to access so thanks a lot

thank you I want one last thing is I

want to give this talk a year from now year from now and be able to actually

have some conclusions here you schedule

it for August [Laughter]