Alan Kay Turing Award Lecture (2004)

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association for computing Machinery's  touring award lecture

the Turing award  is

ACMs most prestigious technical

award  if you look at past Turing laureates

  it'll read like a who's who of computer

  science the Turing award is

given out  annually to an individual

who has  contributed

has given

contributions of  lasting and major technical importance

  to the field and the

Turing laureate is  invited to

give a talk on whatever

topic  they'd like at any

ACM conference during  the year and we

are privileged to have  this year's

laureate choose oops law as  their venue

so without further ado I'd  like to

introduce dr. Alan Kay the he's  a senior

fellow at Hewlett Packard he's  president

of viewpoints Research  Institute and the

Turing award was given  to him for pioneering

many of the ideas  at the root of contemporary

  object-oriented programming languages  for leading

the team that developed  small talk and four

fundamental compute  contributions to

personal computing  let's give a warm welcome

⊕(time: 0:1:47)

of

course one of the funny things

about  the larger citation was it also

said for  coming up and

helping to come up with  many of the ideas that eventually led to  C++

and Java

and

the reminded me of Tony  whores in

his Turing lecture

which was  quite a bit of which was

about Al Gore  he pointed out that algo is

a great  improvement especially on its successors

o about a year

ago I got asked by Sigma  C to

come and give a talk here which  happened yesterday

about early  experiences

in computing

primarily for  high school and to

some extent for first  year college

and I wasn't of course  expecting

to get this award and I

was  had spent a fair amount of time trying

to think about the high school and  college

situation since I had no

real  experience doing a first course

and I  certainly didn't like what

I found when  I went out and read

books and the AP

  stuff and so

forth but I figured nobody

  wants to hear anybody complain even

if  they're telling the truth for an hour so

  what I decided to do was to see if I  were going to

teach a first course in  high school

or college what would it be  like and that was the talk I gave

  yesterday and I

wound up thinking that

  perhaps a slightly different version

of  this would make a reasonable

Turing  lecture so

⊕(time: 0:3:53)

here it is and first I want

  to start off with a Don quote  he

has lots of them but this is my  favorite one of his beware

the above code  I've only proved it correct

not tried it

his is

the perfect antidote to what  what you might call the academy's

ation  of the field which quite

a bit of which  has been an attempt to use classical

  mathematics to deal

with a new  mathematics that requires a new math

to  help describe it so what

new field  I believe

math simple

statement about  our field is that math wins

basically  every time you can do something

reasonably mathematical what we're  trying to do we

make great advances but  it's

rare that old math wins

because we  have a

new way of dealing with things  our

theorems are not short and they're

  not about infinite things

which is what  classical math is generally about the

  equivalent of our theorems and proofs  are

very very long things about finite

  structures and so

different way of doing about and hence  Dawn's quote

which i think is absolutely

  perfect and because our

⊕(time: 0:5:23)

field is the way  it is everything

we do is done within a  community and nobody

has benefited more  from their community than I

have over  the years and

for the stuff I'm

going to  talk about and show tonight a lot of  people contributed

especially over the  last few weeks putting

together some of  these examples

and these are some of the  people

some of them you notice have gray  hair

  this guy I know is here Dan angles and

  who's the the

actual creator of small

  talk I just wrote the math part and

Dan  was the guy who actually made it work so

  we should give him a round of applause

so

⊕(time: 0:6:20)

I guess the first thing to think  about here is we

have these terms  computer science and software  engineering

I happen to be around

both of these terms were made up al  Perlas made up the term

computer science  absolutely

not implying that we had one  but

as something

to actually aspire to  and he I

think he immediately regretted  it even

in the first few years  afterwards because what happened

was  what some people have sometimes

called  physics Envy basically everybody

who  dabbles in the sciences wants

to be a  physicist because

they deal with the  absolute foundations

of the universe and  they do it with serious

math and serious  and experiments so

physics Envy is  science Envy

is often found when fields  wind

up having science in their name

so  library science

social science

computer  science

interesting physics chemistry  and biology don't

have science in their  name

so I

think there can be a science of  computing

similar to science of bridge  building

and in fact Simon

pointed out  in his book called

the science of  Sciences of the artificial

that you

can  have a science about artifacts like

a  science of bridge building build a

  bridge by any means whatsoever stress

it  in various ways analyze it come up with

a theory of build bridge building build  some more bridges

and so forth and in  many ways physics has

found itself  becoming a science

of the artificial  because a lot of physics

is actually all  about the science of

building  accelerators and detectors and

trying to  figure out just exactly what

it is that  those needle swings actually

mean  software

engineering actually was a term  that came about for

a conference like

in  68 and garmisch Germany

and again the  people who went to that conference  except for

a few did not think there was  anything remotely like a

software  engineering at that time and

in fact the  slide shows kind

of a from

the depths to  something that we

might call engineering  today of the difference

between a  pyramid made out of bricks with

no  architecture just a garbage dump with

a  nice limestone cover

made by slaves  sounds like something

that happens a few  miles south of here actually

I can just I can just imagine some

  veronik architect

at some conference  announcing their

new pyramid

on the  other side of the scale we have one of  my

favorite artifacts the Empire State

  Building which is well documented and I  urge every

single one of you who has  aspirations to be an engineer

to read  the

three or four excellent recent books  about

the Empire State Building one of  them is the actual log

by the foreman a  basically

the Empire State Building was  constructed

from start to finish that is

  from carrying down the buildings that  were there

to occupancy in less than 11  months

by less than 3,000 people

  the flooring itself went

up at the rate  of almost two stories a day and the

  steel was still warm about a hundred

  degrees warm from the steel mills in  Pittsburgh

where it came from this is  one of the greatest organized

projects  and the Starrett brothers who did the  Empire State

Building knew they were  making a statement because

the  Depression had just happened everything

was set up to do this thing they had  already done a couple

of skyscrapers and  they had a feeling this might be the  last skyscraper

for a while and so they  decided to

to make it an expression of

what it meant to be able to make a  skyscraper so it's just the

greatest  thing but I think if we look at

our own  field we cannot find any instance of  3,000

people being put together to

something incredible in less than 11  months and have it

work so whatever it  is that we've got

in engineering it  might be closer to Egyptian

or  Babylonian engineering

now somewhere

in

  the middle things with archers

appearing an actual architecture  appeared

interesting thing that  happened some

years before the Gothic  cathedrals was the Pantheon

in Rome  which has this clear span

the dome clear  span of fourteen

stories made out of the  best reinforced

ever known  but two thousand

years ago that was  amazing be

her been in there it looks  like it was made yesterday so

I think  the best practice that we have right

now  in our field as

far as engineering is a  little bit like a Gothic cathedral

  sometimes our projects take a hundred

  years but we

can aspire to build rather

  large structures by the standards

of the  Middle Ages out of

much much less  material than the Egyptians

needed so

  little progress is being made but I

  think that whenever we say computer

  science or software engineering the

specially whenever we think we're  teaching it the

worst thing we could  ever do is to pretend to the students

  that we know what it is because the

  students are

going to be the only ones  that are going to save us

so we should  teach the students

what I was taught  when I was in graduate school in the

sixties and that is it isn't done yet  it's not

even close to done you have to  understand

what the actual scope of  computing is going

to be and you have to  help us invent it  and

in fact in those years

in the ARPA  community the PhDs were given out for

actual advances in the state of the art  as

opposed for as opposed to  commentaries

and small additions to the  state

of the art so it's a very  different time back then but it's a lot  simpler

⊕(time: 0:13:32)

so

I could

give a whole talk  maybe not terribly

successfully about  motivations in

the end everything we do  is

being subject to other people's

interface  I feel particularly

in education but I  thought I'd show

a much simpler model

than we use but it's only a  two-dimensional model and

just have us  all ponder

it for a bit so one dimension

  is in the reasoning and change area

is  the incredible

disparity between the  percentage

of human beings who are  basically instrumental reasoner's

and  those who are basically interested

in  ideas so this has been studied

in a  variety of different ways and it seems  like

the the normal us

normal human  beings are basically instrumental reason

isn't an instrumental reason er as a  person who judges

any new tool or idea  by

how well that tular idea contributes  to his

or her current goal

so most of we're very goal-oriented  we're working

on things somebody comes  up with something new and

our ability

to  accept it or reject it if we're  instrumental

reasoner's depends on  whether we can see it contributing to  our current

goal so the other 5% are  primarily

motivated by ideas so when a  new idea

comes along that appeals to  them they will transform

themselves and  their goals in the presence

of that idea  needless to say the

5% are much easier  to teach

particular if you're trying to  teach

them things that were inventions  rather than things

that are built into  human beings so if you're trying to  teach

something really weird like  science it is not an

easy thing because  you're dealing with a

set of very  practical

and pragmatic kinds of people  so now

the other dimension here is

between basically about reward

inner  motivated versus outer motivated

about  85 percent of us are motivated

by things  outside of

ourselves about 15 percent  motivated by things

inside ourselves and

  so that's kind of interesting and

what  we have

here if we look at this is we  have a kind of an interesting category

  of people who are in term ohta vated and

  interested in ideas I'll leave it for  you to

figure out who those people are  an interesting

category number two is  people who are out are

motivated and  interested in ideas the

people who are  in are motivated and not interested

in  ideas tend to be dangerous and

caused a  lot of trouble a

lot

of corporate  executives

up in there

but basically

our  field is a

field that's the next great  500

year idea after the printing press  and so

we should all be properly  concerned with something quite

different  that

is we have to be concerned with how  the entire

bulk of humanity is going

to  respond and deal with the things that we

  do so it's extremely interesting to

  consider the 80% here

that our outer  moat evaded and basically

practical and  a fair

amount is known about this 80  percent

in the past I've used the term  voting

but

⊕(time: 0:17:35)

you

know this group does not  go to the polls to vote on

the things  they believe in it takes

them a long  time to change what they believe in but  the

way they do it is kind of  interesting and it's

a kind of a  consensus

that is gradual

it's a seeping  kind of consensus

and it has many of the  same characteristics

as a model of a  forest fire

so I have a little particle

  system here and the

percentage of

  trees - the percentage of clearing

here  is just 50/50 so

if I say okay let's see  if if we can spread the fire

throughout  the forest here with a 50%

so I didn't  initialize that

let's try again  so

here's 50%

so surprising that he  doesn't try

let's try go

up to 50 60 % let's say

you  can think of the 60% as

people who are  almost ready to agree people

are  essentially there

so 10% more

it spreads better

try  another one

each time the placement

random so you got a slightly different  behavior

yeah so that's about what you get

babe

  rings itself out so if we go up to like

  66 percent or so 67 66

yeah

so in these contagion models

you  can think of this as spreading means if  you will

roughly two-thirds of

this 80%  has to pretty

much be there before you  can get them

to agree and do something  because they just won't

do it unless  everybody else is doing it

and this  model works really great

for even weird  things like wearing baseball

caps  backwards and girls

showing their belly  buttons

if you trace the girls showing  their belly buttons

over the years  you'll see how gradual

this change was  until suddenly it was

okay and the thing  is if it's okay now

was always okay so  what's the problem well

the problem was  that this group generally

didn't think  it was okay it wasn't okay until about  two-thirds

of them thought it was okay  and then all of a sudden it became okay  so

you're trying to reform education

or  you're trying to get a group of

to understand real object-oriented  programming or

any other new kind of  thing that comes along

you get this  incredible disparity

which in computing  there

are many many instances of roughly

  30-year lags from when

an idea was  really proved out to

when it gets  generally accepted but nobody knows

whether this thirty years actually means  anything or

not but it's it's  interesting to look at the

case of UNIX  and all

of its different adventures

over  the years and finally

being accepted  even though it has

a basically late 60s  architecture

which is better than the  architecture of some of

the operating  systems that are around

  but still it's a fairly old architecture

  and so I'm desperately

trying to hold on  to life until

at least 2007 or

eight  because some quite a bit of

the work at  Parc peaked 30 years ago

and I'm curious to see whether those  ideas will

actually be accepted

⊕(time: 0:22:05)

however  if you look at an extreme case

Doug  Engelbart who had some of the best

ideas  ever I think he was on a different plane

  his ideas are now

getting closer and  closer to being 40

years old in their  articulate

expression and most people  still don't understand what

it was that  he was trying to do I

⊕(time: 0:22:29)

think an ancillary

  problem is that

our field and

people in general take great delight in  complexity

seems

like you go to schools

  is remarkable

how much work they make  the poor kids do

when if they taught the  math

better and differently the kids  would have to do

much less work but in  fact I

think people the light in  complexity

and think that putting  immense

amounts of hard work in even if  there's an easier

way is actually  there's

something morally good about it  and

so I think for our field

one of the  hardest things is the delight and

  complexity because of the many levels of

  structure in computing and

the  difficulty of going from one level

to  another pretty much everyone

who gets  interested in computing and a successful

  Abbot is a person who has mastered  staggering

amounts of complexity now

believe that most of those complexity is  absolutely

unnecessary and I believe it  can be proved that

it's unnecessary  so

⊕(time: 0:23:53)

what we really want is

to find the  joy of simplicity a lot of

this talk is  almost a living cliche

in the sense that

  very little of what I'm going to say  here

is stuff that you don't already  know

but when I started thinking about  what should

I say at this talk  simplicity just kept on coming back

the  all the projects

I've been involved in  that have been successful have been

  successful because the people who worked

  in them put quite

a bit of effort into  keeping things to be

simple and this  community of ARPA

⊕(time: 0:24:35)

and then Xerox PARC  was

outstanding at being

simple and

this  is a very very confident

group of people

  but surprisingly I

won't use the word  modest because I don't think

anybody  would recognize that word applied

to  these people but I would say we

very  very respectful of these grand

ideas  they are trying to do Butler

Lampson  here was

always pounding for simplicity

  Chuck Thacker we

did the alto and just  three months was

a master of simplicity  dan angles master

of simplicity so and

  Metcalf and Boggs

that calf tells a  great great

stories about how he didn't  actually

how many things he'd actually  didn't understand and

it was incredibly  important that he

of those things else he never would have  been able to

invent the ethernet very

Starkweather who did the laser printer  first

laser printer was a page a second  500

pixels to the inch faster

than most  laser printers today

was about  three-quarters made with

got from Edmunds  typic hobby

catalog because

they were  cheap so he could get many

of them and  try them out and so forth

so this

this  particular

way of looking at things  which was basically

Hayward basically  the this

group said we're just nowhere  near as smart as IBM

claims to be  they're always

announcing some new  complicated network architecture

that we  can't see how to make it work and

so  we'll just stick to our old full

duplex  ideas and retransmission and

put a few  other things in there and it

may not  work as well as what IBM claims it's  going to do

but it's probably gonna work  and

funny thing is the network's we use  today are those

terribly designed

  unbelievably inefficient stochastic

  networks that are

far from perfect but  what's great is that they

eventually get  that packet through perfectly you

just  have to be willing to wait so

⊕(time: 0:27:14)

the other  thing that this group

was really good at  was what I call

a different kind of  simplicity

so it's it's hard to claim  that Maxwell's

equations here is simple  because

they're all that work you have  to do

to understand vectors and curl

and  divergence and gradient but

hing about it is once you've done that  work it shrinks

down to something that's  just a simple eyeful

the Constitution

the United States is one of my favorite  systems design

think of it millions

and  millions of mutually incompatible parts

  running without completely breaking for  more

than 200 years pretty amazing

can hold it in your hand the reason you  can hold it in your

hand is there a wise  not to put any laws in it

so it was not  a law based thing it's not a case

based  thing it was a principle based thing  was a kernel

so these

are the kinds of  things that appeal to me greatly

over  the years and

I think trying to give  beginners

at computing a taste for

the  power of the particular kind of  simplicity

that works so well is what we  should do

⊕(time: 0:28:35)

now the other thing I've  noticed in

talking with younger people

  and teaching a course upper

division  course UCLA once a year and

that is that  the it's not so much that the

juniors  and seniors don't

know that much they  actually don't know

that much for being  close

to graduating from college but the  thing that is the

stressing about them  is that the

things that they do know  they know very badly as

they know them  in ways that are almost

  counterproductive for their thinking

and  so I think in a first course

at anything  you have a real chance

to not just teach

  the one subject but in the first

you can actually touch on a lot of  subjects so

for instance I think math  and science should always be

taught  together in the beginning they

came  about that way one is a language

one is  a process I think

systems and computing  should be taught together

I think the  four of them should be taught together

  there arts we should teach you art

and  engineering and why

not throw in a  little bit about how these unusual

ways  of looking at the world have affected

  civilization I think the other

thing  that is so critical and

so absent in  most of our undergraduate computer

  science curricula is the failure to

  think what we're doing as

a kind of  literacy literacy

is something that  comes up about when

you have first ideas  that are worthwhile talking about you

  have a way of writing down those ideas  and discussing

them that gives  literature and literacy is

the ability  to deal with both the spoken

and the  written forms of these

ideas so when we  teach an English class our first

English  class in college we're not aiming

class at people who are going to become  professional writers

when they graduate  four years later

we actually think of  the impact

of the printing press and the  new

rhetorics and new ways of arguing  that came with a printing

press as  something that is

larger than

becoming a  professional reader or writer I

think  the same thing is true of computing

  fifty years from now this will not be

  controversial so right now it's thought

  of as even in mighty Stanford with

its  great endowment as basically vocational  training

in Java and it's primarily  thought

of as teaching kids programming

  and it's absolutely important

to learn  how to program but

computer science and  software engineering

are not the same as  programming any

more than building  Chartres Cathedral is the same as Brick  Lane

you have to understand one

the other but they're very different I  think this

is absolutely critical  because the picture on this little

slide  here is Konrad Lorenz

out swimming in  the pond with his ducks following

  remember of Lorentz

found that whatever  moved

near a duckling during one little  critical period

of a few hours was taken  thereafter

by that duckling to be its  mother and

it would follow even into  adulthood that that

person and rents

found that they would follow him even  more happily if he jumped

into the water  so there he is so

I think whenever we're  introducing somebody to something we

  have to realize that we are going to be  a con

if we're successful we're going to  be a kind of Konrad Lorenz and

we should  take great care to

what we're going to  imprint them on but we don't want to  imprint

them on for God's sakes  his data structures and

algorithms that  was a

great idea in the 50s and

you had  to understand it and it's still useful

  today for optimization and other

of things but it is not the center of  the field

for a long time  and what's

worse about it it doesn't  scale those

very little systems aspect  in way

the data structures and  algorithms are taught and so

I believe  that we have to do

is give the students  a real taste what

the whole deal is and  so they have to

start thinking in  systems ways thinking

in math and  alkaway scientific ways as

we go along  this is a tall order

obviously now we  could all remember

our Conrad Lorentz  and

mine

happened after I'd been a  programmer for five years

⊕(time: 0:33:38)

a journeyman  programmer putting myself through

school  went to graduate school and

was given  Ivan

Sutherlands thesis by Dave Evans  and

Dave said read it

then come back and  talk with me about it

  and it was big thick

thing and but I saw  that his thesis

advisor was a guy by the  name of Claude e Shannon

and I'd heard  of Shannon I thought well

boy if Shannon  signed this thing maybe I should read it

  and I discovered that it

was the most  amazing thing that I

had ever heard of  being done with a computer

up to that  point and

just show

you a little bit of  the idea

of it so this this

which is about the size of this  auditorium

had only one guy on it from 3  o'clock

the morning you know as he just sketched  in something

there then told those edges  to become usually

perpendicular and  sketchpad figured out how to do that for  him

first system to have a clipping

window  are you actually drawing on this huge

  virtual sheet of paper Danny

draw  quickly point to these two

guys and say  okay become parallel figures

out how to  do that now

he's saying be collinear

to  lay yourself over

these lines and of  course

this display on this machine only  plotted points

about half the capacity  of this machine

I'm about here over to  the air it

was just to put these little  dots up on the screen and pretend

it was  a line drawing display

now he's got a  hole in the flange

okay

and he wants to  make a rivet

got some

more ink  notice that the two-handed user  interface

as all user interfaces should  be

put

that other hand is for point

he center of the cross piece there to  get the center

of the arc and again  let's

do the mutually perpendicular  trick

that drags the center guys which  drags the

art guys we got a nice little  symmetric rivet

and he could tell it to  be

in some ratio the

two sides of the  vertical part

of the rivet here he's  just showing it us that will do another  solution

and

now he's going to go

back  to the original form and

show us one  other interesting thing

which

is he can  make instances of this guy

they gets

a instance of the rivet here I  can move it around

and see the success  of sketchpad

led to a desire for a  better looking displays

actually

those  twinkling is they

discovered right away  that you got seasick unless

they  randomly plotted the dots so

mething's being done in there they're  actually sorting half

the memory of the  machine to keep the dot display random

  so it wouldn't swim around much more  than

it it is here

he's

got four  instances now and he says whoops I

  forgot about the cross piece so it goes  to the master

which we would call a  class makes

the cross pieces transparent  and

we see the instances all feel that

so now he

's going to

take this thing that  he just made and make

it into a master  so the new construction

is a master and  now he can get some instances of this

  flange here so the

the

range of  sketchpad was surprising so

by the end  of 1962 he

could not only do stuff like  this but

he decided okay I need

letters  and numbers so he

letters and numbers  were actually made out of the sketchpad

  stuff directly by drawing them in so

f the captions on all of his drawings  and his thesis

were made by the system  as well and

then he realized oh yeah I  can actually do a bridge

because the  bridge actually acts a

little bit like a  very stiff set of Springs and

I can tell  sketchpad

to try and keep these

guys  constant when something is trying to  force

them to move and I can measure the

  disparity the strain

on each one of  these guys and I actually can show

those labels on all of these guys and I  get a simulation

of a bridge without  sketchpad

ever having heard about a  bridge and he realized

oh I can do that  with EMF also I can make

circuits and  the constraints will

actually drive all  of these simulations so

in my career I  think

what I've been doing for the last  forty years is

trying to get the next  version of sketch pad

out because if you  think about what this

thing is this is  kind of what we want we

want something  in which anything that we are

interested  in especially

dynamic things that were  interested in we

can simply draw them in  there

put in the relationships that we  understand

piece by piece and have the  system synthesize all

this into a  dynamic simulation of astounding

range  so it's just beautiful

if they're I  don't know whether our field

Newton  yeah I

knew then

I think it would have  to be ivan sutherland

because the where

the field was before I even came on the  scene and after it was fantastic

so I  want to ask Ivan

how could you possibly  in one

year in machine code

on this big

  but rather slow machine with

no graphics  display on it have done

the first  graphics system the

first  object-oriented software system and the

  first dynamic problem-solving system

and  I even looked at me said well

I didn't  know it was hard

so the period by

way this thesis is available from MIT  should

get it and read it my favorite  line

from it is he says that his hope  that future work will far surpass this

  effort

so

that was my first day

in graduate  school

⊕(time: 0:41:14)

and second day I found out about

hat I was actually in the middle of the  ARPA community which I had no

  realization about and look

lighter was

  not the funder in 1966 it

was Bob Taylor  and they

were just starting to talk  about doing what Licklider called the

  intergalactic Network and the reason he  called it

that is he didn't want people  to design a small network

those original  theory was wherever

electricity plug on the face of the  earth there should be

can plug into this into like  intergalactic

network that the thing had

  the scale at least up to 500 million

to  a billion users so

people were starting  to think about that

in a couple of days  later I got

a tape and some

documents  about a language called Simula from  Norway

by Dahl

here and Nygaard and

it's  very hard to understand and after a lot  of

work and looking at the listings we  realize well this is a programming

  language that is dealing with the same  kind

of structures as sketchpad by

the  way I should mention the you know the  name the

term object predates

  object-oriented programming object

in  the early 60s was a general term

was used to describe compound data  structures especially

if they had  pointers in them there was none

paraphernalia of what we think about as  object native

programming today object  was just a general

term you'll find it  lots of old papers

and the

realization  that you could write procedures

for  dealing with

at sketchpad was doing was very  liberating because

even though it was  ugly compared

to what sketch patters  gets bad was just unbelievably elegant

but nobody knew how to scale that's  Oliver

  in fact that problem has not been solved

  today yet but by

going to the less  elegant

way of being able to write code

  against these structures we

all got  excited about the possibilities of being  able to do

in a system like Simula the

kinds of graphic and interaction  manipulation and

my background coming  into this was

in molecular biology and

  mathematics and

particularly sketchpad  just hit me

right here as one

of these  kernels and the

thing I suddenly  realized was that

if you were  sufficiently

abstract if you ignored  what

these systems were trying to do

if  you just thought of

them as being cheap

versions of all these little computers  on the ARPANET

you could

solve the same  scaling problem in software

then you  could actually subsume

everything in  computing with just one kind of idea  which

is essentially a little software  computer

not a procedure not a data

  structure but a whole computer a lot of  the development

of OOP was

software  engineering after that

interesting things to me in the  development of

who the Elven of  practical as it wound up in spark

was  very similar to

what happened in Lisp  earlier which is boy

we've got this  incredibly elegant wonderful

thing too  bad it runs so slow

but what if we could  make it run

faster in a way that doesn't  get in the users

way then we would have  something really really nice and some

the best actually I just talked the guy  Steele

who is one of the people who

helped make Lisp into something really  special

to use as well as to contemplate

  and so the image here was

WOW it's all  about mess  the

reasons about messages are not about  objects

so much is that the messages are  the abstractions

we spend

time in our field worrying about what  the objects are

so

⊕(time: 0:45:53)

I need to move along a

bazillion  prejudices  I

love parallelism because

I learned how to program plug  boards before

programming a computer and  the beauty

about those things was you  could make a kind

of a machine it was  highly parallel

I loved

hardware like  the B 5000 all of our

today that we use came out of the  hardware of

that machine never

saw fit  to learn anything about

software make  our

lives much simpler  I love

Lisp everybody should understand

  it the giass was

programming language ever done it could  hardly do anything but

it did it  beautifully

so

it's an interesting  challenge to take something of this  level

of beauty and try to scale it you  combine these

two together you got the  original logo that's how logo came

about  attempt to take Lisp and

have something  prettier especially for kids

  I love APL all

of these all of these  systems I think can be done in

a  different way but basically

the love of  these things is because these guys

got  to some special kernel I love what  Engelbart

did a lot of spreadsheets I  loved HyperCard

suppose you could  amalgamate

all these wonderful things  into

a simple system that regular people  can

⊕(time: 0:47:32)

use and now let's talk about the

the  why of

what we're doing why do people

do  things well Frank Oppenheimer in the

  Exploratorium

made 500 exhibits to teach  just one idea the world

is not as it  seems they asked him

why and he said  well every child is different we

have  2,000 children in here bumping against  500

different exhibits there's a good  chance that a child

will find the  exhibit that speaks

to them  clearly about this first important

about science  so he

said 500 of them and I think if  you're going to teach a course in this

  you need

you need

20 to 30 projects or

  so for each area to give the

children  the choice

I

won't

tell you what  quadrant they're in

so

⊕(time: 0:48:59)

I think the  another important

idea is scratch  programming because

so much of computing  education

today is learning the library  and

I don't think beginners should ever  be shown the library

the programming  language can't do interesting

things  without the library then what is it

so I  think

it should be like a Model T Model  T has

about 350 parts and you could

take  it apart over a weekend and put it back  together

but it was a completely real  automobile

so a lot of what we're gonna

⊕(time: 0:49:38)

  look at here in the next few minutes are

  sort of first-order ideas that might

say  some important things now a

good thing  is that many people have

written about  the

fun the beauty the romance what's  important

and about looking ahead in  computing

there's not just one book out  there

and there's less than 1% of

books about computing or worthwhile  reading

but it's not one book there are  dozens

of them and so there's plenty of  ideas

for how to do this stuff

⊕(time: 0:50:17)

  the user interface had better not be

  like Microsoft's

caricature of the stuff

  that was done at Parc which is I always

have the feeling when I'm using Windows  that I'm

dealing with a somewhat  dangerous nuclear

reactor control panel

  and that I haven't had enough training

  on it whereas what I want is something  like

pencil and paper where although  there are things I can learn

about  pencil and paper what I what is most  important

about them is what I can do  without knowing much so

I can find out  the pencil and paper is fun

⊕(time: 0:50:56)

and I want  an environment that

deals with a

set of  ideas in

a way that

gets me to lose  myself in

the ideas so my chick sandy hi

  here was one of our advisors had this  nice

model about this

balance between  our

abilities and the challenges and

he  said well if the challenges are higher

  than our abilities then we start getting  anxious

especially

if we're climbing up  a rock face

we're giving a talk in front  of an audience

  but if our abilities are greater

than  the challenge we start getting bored

so  these are the two main states that  humans

are in either anxious or bored

hard-to-get-to

is this flow state where  everything

is just working and

we like  to widen this flow State for a beginners

  so for example

one of the things we  could do to deal

with areas that where  the challenge is greater than

our  abilities is to increase the safety

  so having undo an environment

nice  most

programming environments don't have  much of an undo

and on the other hand  what because we get bored

so easily we  want something to help us pay attention

  better and a good user interface

basically deals with these things it  provides more safety

than most computer  people think an

ordinary person needs  and it provides more ways of attracting

  their attention than most of us

think  people need

so I just

want to show you a

⊕(time: 0:52:56)

Alan is drawing a car, explain the viewer and some tiles.

  give you a little bit of a flavor about

  how children start

and then show you  where I think things are

actually going  to go so the work

we do with children we

want

them to have an experience that is

  basically thinking

about ideas making  pictures of

them so for example take

  something that most kids would like to  do for

one reason or another which is to

learn

how to drive their parents car

we  get them to design a car and

most kids

  boys and girls put on big off-road

tires  like this because

part of the deal is  feeling powerless and

wanting to feel  empowered this is something that video

  game manufacturers really understand

why  are those games so violent

and so

we have a little graphic object  here and

do things

to it we can open it  up and

see

a viewer of it I

people in the back can't see very well  so I'm looking

at a property here called  the heading of the thing and I'm gonna  count

up the number starts at zero and  as

I count it up you can see the little  car turning I've

got a behavioral  property here forward

I've got a

another  one called turn by and so

if I just drag  out the

lines

of script here and turn on  the

clock

then I've got my little car  going there

are many different kinds of  things

I can do with it  for the kids they want to learn a little

  bit about

driving the car so the first  experiment is

what happens if I click  this number it says turn by

now turn by  zero

it goes straight turn by negative

  I'll call this guy car keep

it straight  here that's a little bit like

kissing  your sister so because real

cars use  wheels so I want to make a wheel here

just draw

one

it's got the same user

  interface as the other one

is a system which is only one kind of  object

so it's exactly the opposite

of  the systems that you're used to that  have zillions

and zillions of classes  and subclasses and and

so forth and we  can talk a little

bit about it about  this in the question and answer system  if you

would like and so here's this  wheel it's

got a heading also and if

pick up the name of that heading and  just drag it over to the script

here so  it says car turned

by wheels heading now  I can just turn

the car around now  what's

important for ten-year olds that  they is that

they learn what a variable  is for the rest of their life from this  one shot

that's good and actually I  believe this

would be good for high  school and college kids too because  there's

quite a bit of evidence that  they they don't ever learn

much about  what a variable actually

is or does ways  of

thinking about it so there are many  different kinds of things here that

can  be done so having

⊕(time: 0:56:50)

Open a viewer on the scriptor and rotate them.

one kind of object  that's kind of weird I

mean here's a a

  photograph which we can see has

the same  kind of feel here the

script is one of  these guys what if I open up its viewer

got

one called scripture here and I see

y'all look really the same kind of thing  so what

if I make a script on the script  here

and get

so I think about the implications of  this

means that wherever I go out

for  instance what if I go over here well

⊕(time: 0:57:32)

Open a viewer on the pane in viewer and rotate them.

the  viewers got one of those things and so

  does this category so

and

⊕(time: 0:57:41)

Open a viewer on the world, and show different panes.

this whole  outside

thing that I'm giving

the talk  in terms of is also

one of these things  so I look at its viewer the viewer of  the world

and

well it's got the same  kinds

of things here we looked at the  various traits

here this is like what  Nathaniel Charlie was talking about

  earlier this notion of

sideways  composition also goes back to park

back  back then in the 70s was called aspects

  but that word means something somewhat  different

now so we

various things you can see oh the thing  is a collection

it's got stuff about

its  colors and borders and other

kinds of  things here and what

here's one that  says as object now an

inheritance system  the object would be way up at

the end of  the inheritance system but in a sideways  composition

object system it's going to  be

one of the traits we're looking at  it's a view of the object

as an object  and we tried to think

about what would  be an interesting way of showing

this  idea of meta so

here's one where I'm  what I'm going to do is suppress all

the costumes on all the objects and I  think this will help you

see that  everything is sort of abstractly the  same

⊕(time: 0:59:5)

Choose world useBluePrintCanvas: to change the look.

here ok so

basically I just turned  off the costume mechanism

now I have  this interesting problem of getting back

but that's why I left

my mouse here so  this is the guy who did it I'm gonna  click the

little carrot here which I  know is there

to make it false and then  we're gonna hit the

exclamation point to  turn everything back on again

you see  I'm talking about them basically

meta is  safe if you

can allow fence after fence  after fence after fence

now there are  many many

examples which have had

longer talk I'd show you but I wanted to  show you the last

set of ideas here so  if

we could just go to the video to  please in the

back ok

so return to  sketch pad here

and if we look at a more

  future oriented environment

we see that  we now have the

ability of doing much  more complicated

ways of thinking of  environments so

⊕(time: 1:00:17)

Switch to a Croquet Image.

here I am in a 3d

environment that we built called croquet  by

the way the if your interests and the  kids stuff that's found on the website

  squeak LAN org and

this croquet  environment

this is all free software  croquet environment

is found on open  croquet org

and

so again this is a  completely

constructible environment  here but

what we did was

to do a

kind of  an interesting analogy to webpages

  so each 3d

world here is like a web page  and these portals are like a hyper

link  to them

so I'm just going to pop Alice  to enter this

guy here

I'm just going to  do a 360

this

is a Mars environment all

of these  environments are buildable

I'm just  going to show

one last thing so

I can end on time I

  kind of like bridges as an analogy here

  so we

have a bridge structure

and

I want  to show you what the kids scripting

  environment looks like for doing

bridge so the first thing we want to  look at is

the little script for Masse's  basically

what we have here is F equals  MA

acceleration is

the force divided by  the mass the velocity is

increasing by  the acceleration and

the location

of all  the little elements on here

is going to  increase by the velocity and

I'm going  to turn on the the

force here

to work

and say okay let's do do that

so this  bridge structures

feeling gravity

and  you can see it coming into equilibrium

  could have made it stiffer

but let's  look at the springs the

springs are  fairly stiff

K gets - 1400

here and so

what I'm going to what I'm going to do  here is to make

it - 400 tell

it to go  ahead that's going to let

it sag quite a  bit more then

we all remember the Tacoma  Narrows Bridge film

so of course we have  to have

some wind and

basically what I'm  going to do here

is turn on a variable

  gusting wind that's completely described  by

this script here and

okay so now it's  going to do

some Tacoma Narrows stuff

I need sound I noticed the

sound wasn't  working thank

you

let's take a look at  our

bridge

and you know it's funny when you

look at  a model of steel if

you remember that  Tacoma Narrows Bridge movie

it was  really like the bridge was made out of

  fabric of some kind and this has this

kind of same aspect and that gave us an  interesting idea here

so

I think a good way to end this talk  is just to

say that if

we can't get kids  interested in the romance why

this is  unbelievably beautiful new

art form then

  we're not living up

to what our duty is  of enjoying the

stuff ourselves we have  to reach deeply inside of

ourselves to  remember what it was that first got

us  interested in this wonderful new thing

  remember that it hasn't

even started yet  and it's

our duty to help the children  as young as

possible try and do a better  job of it than we have

thank you very  much

Thank You Alan

for a fantastic talk and  we

have a token of our affection here

as  well that concludes

our Turing

Award  lecture and you're welcome now

to go

get  dinner and

then afterwards at 8 o'clock  we'll

be beginning the last

thing on  this evenings agenda

the tenth  anniversary reunion