Alan Kay interview: a must read!

Ecris le 13 février 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

LtU pointed a very, very, very nice interview of Alan Kay in ACM Queue. I wanted to give you some extract, but actually, every paragraph worth a citation.Anyway, I extract this one for you:

SF So Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?AK No, if you look at it really historically, Smalltalk counts as a minor Greek play that was miles ahead of what most other cultures were doing, but nowhere near what Shakespeare was able to do.If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it?s certainly engineering of a sort?but it?s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.SF The analogy is even better because there are the hidden chambers that nobody can understand.

And another one:

Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark?on roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore?s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there?s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures.The myth that it doesn?t matter what your processor architecture is?that Moore?s law will take care of you?is totally false.

Go and read!

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