Keynote: Making Progress - Alan Kay

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to sponsor today's keynote it is hard

to fairly summarize the career and experience of our speaker today

he is a pioneer in programming language design the

father of the modern gui and a decorated recipient of just about

award the software field has to offer

today i have the pleasure of introducing

a visionary mind who happened to cross paths with a fledgling industry

invention more than 50 years ago and it has managed

to hold its interest ever since

our modern software industry stands on the shoulders

of them here today philly ete

please welcome dr alan kaye

thank you

it's great to come to phil to philly

even if it's by the internet no

cheese steak sandwiches but

uh we'll get there next year

uh this talk is about making progress

uh i always like to

acknowledgements first because they

get lost at the end so these

people were especially helpful for

me preparing this talk

so

making progress the traditional

way going back hundreds of thousands

of years is just through smarts

and here's a very smart guy leonardo

smarter than any of us

uh he had big ideas many

kinds of vehicles to roll around

and fly but none of them worked

because his normal

the normal of his century failed

him and he wasn't smart enough to transcend it

and in fact you can imagine what it might

be like to have twice leonardo's iq

but be born in uh

say 10 000 bc

you're not going to get too far before they burn you

at the stake so here's a guy

henry ford who was nowhere near as smart

as leonardo but he didn't

have to be because he was born in the right century

and normal was enough for

him he was able to make millions of the vehicles

that leonardo couldn't

and the reason normal was enough for ford was because of

this guy isaac newton

who changed the context of the century

that he was in

this book which is

uh about many things including

the system of the planets

has nothing about it about

automobiles except everything about it

because it changed what normal was

about and so one way of thinking about this is

knowledge is silver

context is gold and very often

iq is led

you have to couple iq with the right

kind of knowledge and you get that most

strongly by finding the right kind of

context now in computing

draws smart people

they tend not to have enough knowledge

and they tend to be in very weak context there are a bunch

of reasons for this but this talk is

really about finding the context

that are available and making use

of them so

one way of thinking about today we have a

all have a perception

of normal that is somewhat subjective

it's what we think is normal

and these normals are embedded in now

hich has a lot of stuff in it that we're not

aware of we can't see much in

normal because we think of it as reality so we have to look at

it really closely to start finding

distinctions everything that's going on

in normal is definitely not good there's

also this concept of bad there's worse

there's qualitatively better

and so we

can make choices here

but as engineers

as technical people in general making

progress is about what is actually needed

that is a threshold it's the

important threshold we can ever determine

it's not better

it's not perfect it's what is actually

needed for the task at

hand in the context that we're in

and engineer

engineering is works

at its smoothest when what is actually

needed is in the normal context of the engineers

doing the work it's well known

stuff skill can be

used to apply it and things often

go quite well but

uh in some cases like

doing the space program and

bending some new technology

we have to get outside of

the normal of people participating

in it but some of the knowledge is already

the now and so what we have to do there

is just learn it

but for instance inventing something

like the internet getting

to the moon we have to get outside

of what's known and

in order to do that we have to venture

into research something that

much more tentative and explorative but

can extend out the knowledge that we have

children are actually in a nice place they don't know

a lot but they operate in a really nice

area because they don't have a strong notion of what

normal is school will eventually give them a bad

version of normal but up to that point

they're in a kind of state of grace

now i think for much of computing going forward

what's in most people's normals

good enough we'll talk about that

a little bit as we move along so my

job in this talk is to channel one of my mentors

jerry bruner and

instead of talking about

uh strange things and trying to make them familiar

i'm going to try and take what we think we know and

strange again so we can actually think about

and so here's some code

uh this is some of my

favorite code to look at and we can see it's

actually the lunar lander

from the pilot uh

guidance computer

this was used in the 60s and it's the thing we went to

the moon on cubic foot

of some of the earliest silicon transistors

they had all of 4k bytes

of random access memory

73k bytes of

read-only memory no disks no

tapes no secondary or tertiary memories

that was it it ran at a

85 000 instructions

million not billion

and it had a higher level language

in it for a variety of reasons it

ran at 41 operations per

second nonetheless it had

a real-time operating system and it had to

ccasionally thousands of processes

memory because it was

the only computer on the spacecraft

and it had to do both the

apollo

crew module and the the land the lunar

lander so this is a very interesting process

for writing software and we can see some of these comments

might be familiar to

you the hope i hope a hope there's

a kind of a sequential

flavor to this

programming but down below we say

uh continue with the automatic landing the automatic

landing this thing is landing the

uh something on the on the moon

it's restarting has there been a restart what

does all this mean so here's the

head of all of the software except

for the operating system in this

computer and here are the listings

to that software margaret

hamilton uh had a degree in pure

math and learned a program

as a for

fun and then worked on the big sage system

air defense system and then

started as a programmer at draper labs

to do this software and in a few years

they made her the head of all

of the application software

um when she showed

this uh to some friends of hers they said well

this doesn't look like pure math at all and

she said well it isn't and they said well what are you doing

she said well it's essentially software engineering

she is one of the three corners

phrase of our profession software engineering

what is it

many people today will tell you software engineering is what

they're doing but that isn't the way she thought about

it she took the word engineering very very seriously

and here's why

a few years later

we did make it to the moon

it's an oh yeah

technical term for oh yeah it's holy

oh yeah is what you want to get to

when you're doing engineering

and during this landing old 1202

popped up while they were trying to land

on the moon and that was a signal that

the computer was being overloaded

this is because an astronaut

actually threw a switch when he wasn't supposed

to uh

she was told several years earlier that astronauts

mistake and don't bother about

fault tolerance in this

on this tiny computer and she doubted

this for a very good reason we can talk about that in the

if you want and she decided to make everything fault

olerant and so her answer was

when overloaded it's designed to keep restarting throughout

throwing out low priority processes and never

crash and so they

trusted her kept on with the landing and we made

it and in fact

here's hal lanning who did this

uh the operating system and design part of the computer

uh through all of the lunar

the apollo program there

was not one bug not one crash

no astronauts were harmed

in any way and

many were saved because of the way these

two did this software

and as they said well we're making

systems not simple programs simple

programs are like stories but systems are not like

stories and engineering is making

secure systems with integrity

that's what that's what engineering means

whereas a few months ago 52

years after the lunar landing

i saw this in the paper the

is set up to get

people their vaccinations crashed

how is this possible

people undoubtedly died

because of this they spent months trying to get

this very very simple application going

well you have to deal with something that is

larger that has more

relationships than regular

programming deals with now of course i'm

knows here real question is

not whether you know it but how often do you

do it in every line of whatever code

writing systems design looks

more like a constitution than a collection of laws

or a story it's a bigger thing

and as they said you're in deep trouble if you don't use

fault tolerant loose coupling

late binding not early

and as margaret

said what is actually needed is development before the

fact software engineering what she meant

by that the fact is

an error a bug a

crash that hurts somebody or something

you want to develop before

the fact so that doesn't happen you're going to have errors

but the way they went

about things is that no error

should actually be able to

propagate to cause real harm

because the moonshot

was done really early

in many kinds of technology

and so it was actually a systems

coordination of 400 000 people

maybe 20 000

companies and uh 178

or so billion dollars of today's money

so everything that they did was about

trying to think in terms of systems

half million

parts just in the apollo command

module and another two and a half million parts

in the lunar lander

well

if what you're trying to do is not a story

we know how to tell stories that's what i'm doing right now

it's a system how do you tell a system

well you have to make something like this

and the purpose of these big rooms

wide angles is to answer questions like

these these are the things that we need to know

them about the entire system

so we

notice that if your user interface designer which most

people aren't this is also the main job of the

user interface this is what you have to think about

the questions you have to answer

what when i've been asked in

do some consulting the first thing i want to see

when i visit a software organization

is where is your situation room

where you can understand what's going on virtually

nobody has them and

there's no really no excuse for it not just because

video projectors are cheap now but because

if you think about it real hard wide

angle virtual reality is fantastic

for dealing with

a system you don't even need 3d

just virtual reality and 2d

will give you the sense

thing and allow the kind of

meetings that you need to have when you're dealing with

complexity

and of course here's a famous one

grander than the ones that we actually need

the

bible is full of

stories but what michelangelo

wanted to do was to give a sense of the system

and it's a wide-angle thing

many people who are listening to this talk will have have been

and the

problem with the laptop screen is the the angle

of vision is too wide we can get a

huge angle of vision by getting close but our eyes are not made

so we need

something that allows us to deal with

information in our periphery as well

as uh in our fovea

and at the bottom i say systems are about happenings

i mean stories are about happening systems are about

relationships okay so

here's a big body of water of

course we want to get across it and historically

the way things started was somebody

something could be a log

in this case it's a rope bridge

tinker little bridge

it's one kind of knowledge and tinkering we share

tinkering with uh all primates

and most mammals and

the second kind of knowledge we have is liking

what we tinker or not and

often that will lead us to be much more careful about

thinking about building something or cooking

a meal and engineering got started

really early because it didn't have to know why

things worked it just had to find out what worked

and so in the old days you would gather a kind

whether it's for a bridge or for

people

soon started realizing that you could do a

lot of work with symbols and this is one

of the biggest drivers for the mathematics that we

know today to replace with symbols

and models uh

the more costly having to build large

things that fall down

then only a few hundred years ago we get

science science

is a very different kind of way of

looking at things it gives us a theory

in this case it's a theory

artifact a theory of a bridge because science doesn't

care where the phenomena come from

science is about the relation we can

talk about this if you want in the

q a so five

knowledge this is their historical

if we come back and look at

the akashi strait here and how big is this

straight well there's the empire state building and

the great pyramid of giza in

europe in egypt

and oh yeah yeah we can get

so this

is the largest suspension bridge in the world

and it required a

combination of

getting the science done feeding the

science back into the engineering using

models and

making a wonderful synthesis of

these main disciplines

that is why it's really uh our greatest

be born into this time

uh of science engineering and mathematics

working together

well here's another dream about water

this time about flight

icarus leonardo took

had engine problems

people tried to do man-powered flight

a british industrialist henry cramer

put up money big money about

seven or eight hundred thousand dollars today

for the first real man-powered flight

they kept on crashing the planes

and after some decades of this

uh the guy who was the first world

champion and an aeronautical engineer

mccready was trying to figure out how

to pay off a debt his brother-in-law

had incurred and that morning he had noticed that the exchange

rate made the kramer prize for

flight exactly

the debt his brother-in-law had incurred and started

thinking about and his main thought was well

the best people in the world

knew a lot of the people who were doing this best people in the world have

n't had anything close

to his success what's what is the problem and he said

well the problem is we don't understand the problem

so he abandoned thinking about human-powered

flight and asked what is a better problem

and he went back to his group

in simi california

bout human-powered flight

something that

can be repaired so quickly that we can handle 10 crashes

a day something is just made

out of really scotch tape and some mylar and

some aluminum struts

and six weeks later they had

had more flights and more crashes than everybody

else in history put together

and

in six months

they won the kramer prize

and

a few months later

they won the lot even larger kramer prize

nglish channel about 22

and the british

press interviewed mccready and

asked well how could you do this

so easily when everybody else was struggling

for decades and and he said well

they were trying to build an airplane we were trying to do human-powered

flight in other words having an airplane

as a goal was actually counterproductive

because

these ultralight planes with these huge

wings and huge difficulty in turning

weren't really enough like an airplane so that prior

instead some science

had to be done probing what the real world

was actually about in this place

where airplanes didn't scale

so

here's one way of thinking about this

so we're taught to go

from a to b in school

that's problem solving

but in fact real problems have more dimensions

so often there the things

get really really difficult in various ways we're

smart we'll abandon the what we're trying to do

and explore that will sometimes allow

super highway that's much more

efficient we could invent something to fly over the uh the

obstacles basically we have to get out of

this pink way of thinking and sometimes

when we do that we will find

a sea that's a destination that we couldn't even imagine

before and so

that allows us to come back

to the dream of icarus which is much

more than uh getting across

the channel in fact it's 72

miles from crete to santorini

that was the the flight of the fable

well we got had the dream the tinkering

was done the engineering

was done really well to get across the channel

now we need to science the out of it as matt damon would

say and uh mit

and a number of nasa and a number

of other big guns got interested in what mccready

had done and really went out

after it so they could then engineer the out of

it

and not too many years ago this

flight likened

to two marathons was made

from crete to santorini

following the route of daedalus

so this is another one of those oh yeahs

that if you don't love this

you shouldn't be in engineering

so we've talked about these five

of activities knowledge outlooks

and these five different things attract

different personalities

and but

we can see that there could be uh an intersection

where all five of these are actually

more powerful now all of the great research

groups that i've been in

uh have people who

are good at each one of these things who have learned all

and this is where the modern

world comes into play it's just not enough

to be a tinkerer or an engineer

when you're working on important problems

o a great group you

can think of this like a basketball team this is a five

there are five kinds

things here so outside shooting passing

play making dunking

reat group is smarter than the smartest

member a great basketball team is

a better basketball player than the best

person on the team bad group is stupider

than the stupidest member a bad basketball team is worse

than the worst member so a

whole deal here and this is

110 of the problem

real things according to the best

i know is getting the

right people robert hyland had a good

the only form of life with 10 bellies

and no brain so you don't want that

now when i look out

at the world software still seems

like a fair amount of tinkering a little bit of engineering

people like their tinkering too much

well we've seen that there can be

a real engineering of software

it happens rarely but it has happened

something that can stand up to

sense of the term engineering

what margaret and hal did for the moonshot

the work on the internet and so forth but

what about science of computing what if we took the word science

not as a metaphor

but what if we took it seriously for what science is actually all

well science looks at phenomena so we

get phenomena from artifacts and we don't want to look at the artifacts

directly we want to see the fireflies

cientists try and find the fireflies it's you don't want

to get distracted by what seems to be there it's

what underlies it and john mccarthy

in 1958 came up with a hell of a t-shirt

to uh characterize

what he thought computing was about

and it's kind of like maxwell's equations for

software but uh

on a on a t-shirt like maxwell's equations

are and he wrote a great paper

of newton-esque one of the things he

pointed out in 1958 he said look

programs are going to

participate in their programs

in order to do that

the representations that they deal with have to

represent meaning in ways that are not

just outside the programs the way most programs are

but where the meanings are actually

encoded as relationships that

other programs can understand so this is part about

what he was about which was not just doing a

programming language that was very high

level but doing a programming language that was also meta

eye level and could look at itself what we call

reflection today

okay

well math

doesn't have to be real but

in computing we have to implement stuff to

vet it and steve russell

said well looking at mccarthy's t-shirt

if i implement it we'll have a running system and as john

said he did and we did

so you get all of these things in computing if you do

the design really well

and it doesn't have to be slow

because you can make a machine that will run it fast this is like

people have finally gotten around to the idea

of gpus uh 40

years ago they are derided wait for moore's law

and but in fact before that

uh people who are really serious about high-level

were building special machines that would run them very

efficiently and this is a list machine

and the idea is a

great idea that slow can often be optimized and retain

goodness

remember computers are only there to run programs

and the job of programmers is not to make intel look

good intel has got it backwards

hould be doing is learning

about software which it doesn't

and making processors

that will run the highest level languages

most efficiently and they don't

and the problem is trying to optimize

early makes it very very difficult for most people

to even have a good idea

so this is where you have study this is

from more than 60 years ago and again

you can learn a lot from just learning lisp

and how mccarthy went about it but

really the main point is what are the fireflies

from this landmark piece of work

well here's my

research community and some

of the oyas that it did in the 60s

just point out here's hal lanning again he did

the first interactive higher level language

it actually started working

before fortran and fortran was not interactive

the bottom row was done by xerox

about five years by a

grand total of 25 researchers so

this is not all the technology we use today but a lot

of it was done by this one community

and outside the community there's a lot

of pushback you know why would you want

would say well why we'll make a qualitative difference

doing no you really aren't why is too slow

well we know how to speed it up why it takes too long to make well

quickly well y is for sissies

so this has happened in waves

over a very long time

our funders

didn't worry about what the outside world

was thinking and let

stuff and

here is the uptake on some of these ideas

only about 30 percent on engelbart there over on

the uh the middle right

100 on the internet nobody

to do one 100 on the ethernet

nobody knew how to do one similarly the laser printer

only 50

on uh the alto personal

computer because people thought they knew

computers especially intel

and so what you've got is something that looked kind of like

but couldn't do what it could do and

the best software we did i estimate there

was only about 10 percent take up everybody thought

program and in fact everybody

does that's not the

point okay so but here we

go back to where we were talking if remember we

decided i decided that

most uh computer

people is actually hurting

and another way of looking at this

is to

think about and this is in my

that too much of software

is still like tinkering

the aesthetics are actually people loving their

tinkering too much and there's a little bit of engineering

here and there and occasionally a whole big thing of

engineering it's not that everything is bad

it's that too much of it is

and so we really need after 40

years of this we've got

something like all of the plastic junk in the pacific

going we actually need something that

gets beyond uh the best stuff

that is known now we

need more research and the good old funders they aren't around

anymore but i think for practical

are working for companies who are

trying to make progress at a more local

level the question really is is

what is the thing that

can be done that uses some

of what you do know and

requires a little bit of learning of stuff that is already

known that could make a huge impact

the thing i picked for this talk

was scaling

because scaling was forced on computing by

moore's law and except

for a few uh special cases

the industry has done extremely

badly at dealing with scaling

so i use this font

heuristic here says if

big needs try to do a

margaret margaret had limited resources she

had big needs and what she thought

through is what is what do you absolutely have

to do in order to make some

progress and especially to do

build the rest of the stuff that's needed on

okay this is a real picture

i like it because it reminds me of a lot of things

ign do not touch any of these wires

this wire over here was

once a good idea and so

somebody added another wire and added

another wire and pretty soon you got this

so the two biggest problems here are

lack of systems thinking because most

people are taught programming as algorithms and data structures

not as systems thinking

and the other is this idea of premature

optimization of intertwining the

optimizations in the code rather than

meaning out from the

optimizations

okay so this tangle of wires

is

involving everything together but you

can replace everything in this room with just a simple

ethernet it's just a simple thing in fact

cars are starting to do this now after 40

years and we spent a long time

trying to get xerox to replace the wiring harness

in xerox machines with something like a simple ethernet

so if we look at networking

at in this arpa park

research community

look lighter called for an intergalactic computer

network in 1963

he was asked why and he said well

engineers always give you the minimum i wanted to cover the earth

so i've asked for intergalactic i need to force

them out away from trying to

use things that don't scale like the way the telephone system

is done and he was a psychologist but he

had a very good sense of systems

and he said if we succeed in making the intergalactic

then our main problem will be learning to communicate

with aliens we'll see what that means

a bit and so

thinking about networking

in this community the idea was what can we

scale can we scale communication by

uh let's say 10 or 11 orders of magnitude

without the thing breaking

and of course if we scale it like that we can't afford to

take it down so it has to run continuously

no matter what goes wrong with it

and many of you will be familiar

well although many i've found to many computer

people don't really understand why the internet

works it works so well it doesn't seem to be a

rtifact like it never crashes

you cannot crash the internet

because messages cannot be commands

any crashes that happen

happen inside individual computers because of bad

software somebody put there

ach computer on the

alien as is the

software inside of it so you have to think about what

communicate with aliens even just to send

it's too big to control from a center

you can't have a hierarchical control system

you have to have something that's more like biology where there's

no center the system itself

has to take care of keeping itself stable

that was one of the most fun problems to work on

and under

this scheme and a few other things i'm not mentioning here

the computers can't be other than servers

you can't command them

you can only ask

would you do this for me please they can say

no you separate

everything you can separate the transport

from the assembly and error correction

that's what the slash means there

the reason it was done is when they were working on tcp

they're already thinking of things like udp

you need to have various ways of

with uh this very complicated

being made so here are

some of the many heroes for

both the internet and the uh

ethernet

okay so while this was going on a bunch of us

were also working on the idea of

a software internet where you have virtual

computers computer uh connect with a software bus here

some of the heroes there i single

out dan angles because he was the first one to make

an artifact that you could

do large systems completely

successfully in

same basic idea you

have to have 100 percent encapsulation

messages can't be commands you have to

deal with aliens and

these virtual computers can't be other than servers

well

this is a problem because

now that we've got this software net

still doesn't tell us how to organize our computations

o first let's analyze some of the mess that we've made

and a good book to read about this is alexander's

first book which is a better

book i think about design

than his pattern language books

so

you've got a bunch of things that you have to deal with let's

them processes but if we look closely we

really complex about them are the relationships

between them

and what you want to do is find

the least connectivity

to make modules

figure those to be

the communications paths and then encapsulate everything

now you've

simplified that one part of

it but it's not that simple because

what if you want to reformulate things

that might not be the best decomposition there's

a lot more things to think about and going in the opposite

direction designing a system is more difficult

because you have to supply the information

that extra information to come up with relationships

so here are some of the heroes

thought about this especially

how you do the intercommunication

note that some of the things that

favorites today like type schemes and naming

of things don't scale at all well

send to something that's across a billion node

network the chances you're going to get type

matching is zero

and that you'll know the names of all the things you need to

know are close to zero also

you have to go from types

of things to descriptions and behaviors

the descriptions and behaviors can

bit like types but they're of a larger

scope you're

two of the most interesting thinkers about this

doug lennon for meanings of things and glerder

thought

about how you coordinate all of these things over arbitrary

scales did a system in the 80s called linda

it has a really nice t-shirt you

should look at it and see

what you think about it okay

so

now that we've virtualized everything

can put our software internets on

all the hardware

and we can connect those

up by messaging and what this

allows us to do is to completely disappear all of

the hardware of the internet

and do all of our software using virtual processes

this allows us to

send a virtual process somewhere else if it needs

to run faster there or can do a better job

one of the first times this was done in a

way that was really important was in postscript

done by john warnock and chuck

geschke who later went on to found

a little company called adobe if you

think about it the an

interpreter is smaller than all

of the knowledge you have to know to parse all of the

might have to parse to deal with all

of the possible printers printing of pages

you need to have so you're much better off

sending the program that

is what we used to call

objects just send a process to

the printer the printer can execute it blindly and

safely and you print out what's left and

that is why adobe is the company that it is

this was done in a general way

by jerry popek for unix

system called locus wrote a

book take a look at it so here's

a big idea that's hard for people to get

to a computer is universal

so every kind of thing at every scale

can be represented and made from a software computer

you only need one kind of abstraction

wrap everything in and

if you do that it will allow you

to unsnarl all the problems of meaning

from the many separate problems of

optimization

today there are many different kinds

of manifestations of this thing but

virtually none of them are complete enough to actually

scale

well

complete encapsulation i'm

now saying publish and subscribe because it's

usually done really badly so i'm

saying publish and subscribe done really well

you need to understand

what both leonard and galender

are getting to you have to wrap everything

you've got controls

the mess in the pacific make every new

stuff in the new thing and then there's a whole bunch

that actually has to be learned

beyond this but the nice thing about it

is that this stuff that has to be learned beyond

this and the research that has to be done is something

that actually can build on

on what i'm talking about here

okay i'm gonna

wind up here with how not to make progress

it's hard not to love this guy

here's macarthur wheeler robbing a bank

and being caught by the camera

here he is handcuffed in

jail it was very easy to run him down and

he was incredulous he said but i wore the juice i wore the juice

what juice well he smeared his face with

lemon juice because somebody had shown

can make invisible link with lemon juice and he figured

smearing his face with lemon juice would make it impossible

pick him up yep

true story and he's not the only one

this is sometimes called the dunning-kruger

those are the two psychologists who studied wheeler

it's now a syndrome and of course all humans

have it we are always

almost always overconfident but

some people have it to a ridiculous extent

these smug pilots have lost touch with regular

passengers like us who thinks i should fly the plane well

crazily peop some people do

we just had a president who

could run the comp country without any basis

whatsoever and people agreed with them

on the other hand if you really want dunning-kruger

take a look at most software if you want something that is more

confident than its actual abilities take

software of all kinds

the difference that

software needs is rarely built in by programmers

this one is particularly dangerous

the boeing 737 max

autopilot and now

we are not funny anymore because everybody here

is literally going to die and they

two plane loads died because

of boeing management

so a combination of doing a really bad job

of every phase of engineering here

the management killed a bunch

of people and i found this

picture uh some months ago

about the that showed the electronics

bay in the 737 and

my reaction was whiskey tango

foxtrot as we used to say in the air force it's like what

the this this is what this

aircraft and then about three

weeks ago i found this in the new york times

potential electrical problem with the max

component of the electrical power system

on max planes was sufficiently fastened or

so this is what we

really have to deal with here this is what real engineering

is about is dealing with the whole system

and

we end with this tranquil scene here's a bridge

that's just about 2 000 years ago uh

old and it looks many parts of it look like

it was built yesterday here's a plane that's about 10 years

the pledge

of a real engineer is the bridge must not collapse

the plane must not crash

must not harm or fail

and the software has more

degrees of freedom and reach than anything so the

engineering has to be of an even higher quality

than developed engineering

we don't really know how to do this very well but we

need to aspire to it and think about it

every second of our careers

thank you very much

uh so

alan if we have uh if we have time for questions

hown up in the uh in the chat

and in slack um

so i i see one right here what are your thoughts on the progress of

interfaces in the last 20 years specifically as programs

have moved from running natively to running on browsers

well

so i think the first thing is

the i think the best exercise any

software engineer can go through is to see

if they can find out how to criticize

the web and the

browser in

a way that

has some objectivity to it

one of the worst designs that has ever been done in

computing and at least

in the when i teach a class at ucla

i can't find even the graduate students who can

criticize it they can't

even criticize it and compare it to much better

applications done on personal computers

o that's the first thing then the second

thing is the good news is

that although the overall user interface

uh i think is

much worse so one of

just access to

controls the user interface

is uh

let's see

sorry

a user interface is something where

you need to be able to

explore you need to be able to try things and recover

from and so if you look for example

on the iphone and the ipad

you find almost no undo

left one of the ideas was you shake the iphone

but almost nobody who implements an app for

the iphone or the ipad that

implements an undo from the act of shaking

it so this is a great step backwards to help

how do i find out how to do something

like how do i find out what gestures would

really make me powerful in this app

doesn't exist and a

gesture based system is actually something that

is designed to become an expert

it's designed to be more efficient than

uh dealing with uh

simple pointing and so you need to have

help systems so what i think of as

the paraphernalia that are needed just

to deal with things that are like personal computing

in the web and the web browser

are really badly lacking

but then it's also been 50 years since

the park gui and

there are many more things that need to be done

but the good news is i'll just give you one name

who uh

that name is brett victor look him

up take a look at his web page

he is one of the best user

interface designers ever

as every bit as good as we were 40

50 years ago and if you look at

the stuff that he's been working on the last few years

he's not just doing some of the nitty-gritty stuff

better but he's also doing some of the larger thinking

better i think of him as

a worthy intellectual

heir of uh doug engelbart

so it's actually hard to pick the questions out there's a lot of activity

on the slack channel with with all kinds of positive feedback

and applause for the uh for your talk

so so thank you again uh for everything i've i've picked a couple

there's there's a few questions in here with people asking for you to

clarify some of the comments that you you made

one of them is to talk a little more about uh what

means for a language to be interactive versus non-interactive

well

the last time i looked c plus plus was not interactive

meaning it doesn't even have

print loop screen

and that is a far cry from

where small talk got to 50 years

ago which

is not just being

able to type commands in but being able

to deal with an entire live environment

so part of the thing is uh

if you think about the internet the internet

is has to be

it has to always be live

it cannot be taken down to fix it just

as our bodies

we have to be fixed while we're still alive it's hard to bring us

back to life and so once

you get into that range which people started

getting into very seriously because this is the message

when you're doing scaling of

computing systems is you have to move from this

idea of running little jobs or doing little

something or taking out a server

to do maintenance on it that's crazy the

server on the internet is just a name

if something wrong with one server hardware put in

another piece of hardware they're cheap

copy the stuff over and then take the bad hardware

offline so the whole attitude

about liveness

and by the way liveness is a relatively

new phrase which is crazy considering

that was what the opera community and the park community

all about personal computing the whole

it was to make live things

that people

that acted as sort of complementary

partners in people's intellectual

and artistic pursuits

well thank you again

if you have a few extra minutes we'd invite you to

join us on the slack channel there's some other questions

to in the um and we're gonna

room a um and we'll we'll copy some

chant the questions in there so um

so so thank you again