Interview with Alan Kay
Original at: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442


The pioneer of object-orientation, co-designer of Smalltalk, and UI 
luminary opines on programming, browsers, objects, the illusion of 
patterns, and how Socrates could still make it to heaven.

In June of this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) 
celebrated the centenary of Alan Turing's birth by holding a conference 
with presentations by more than 30 Turing Award winners. The conference 
was filled with unusual lectures and panels (videos are available here) 
both about Turing and present-day computing. During a break in the 
proceedings, I interviewed Alan Kay — a Turing Award recipient known for 
many innovations and his articulated belief that the best way to predict 
the future is to invent it.

[A side note: Re-creating Kay's answers to interview questions was 
particularly difficult. Rather than the linear explanation in response 
to an interview question, his answers were more of a cavalcade of 
topics, tangents, and tales threaded together, sometimes quite loosely — 
always rich, and frequently punctuated by strong opinions. The text that 
follows attempts to create somewhat more linearity to the content. — 
ALB]

# Childhood As A Prodigy

Binstock: Let me start by asking you about a famous story. It states 
that you'd read more than 100 books by the time you went to first grade. 
This reading enabled you to realize that your teachers were frequently 
lying to you.

Kay: Yes, that story came out in a commemorative essay I was asked to 
write.

Binstock: So you're sitting there in first grade, and you're realizing 
that teachers are lying to you. Was that transformative? Did you all of 
a sudden view the whole world as populated by people who were dishonest?

Kay: Unless you're completely, certifiably insane, or a special kind of 
narcissist, you regard yourself as normal. So I didn't really think that 
much of it. I was basically an introverted type, and I was already 
following my own nose, and it was too late. I was just stubborn when 
they made me go along.

Binstock: So you called them on the lying.

Kay: Yeah. But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years 
later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret 
Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s — no TV, 
living on a farm. That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. 
Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, 
but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. 
Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, 
and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning 
point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible 
for getting me interested in education. My interest in education is 
unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I 
have an enormous desire to create better adults.

# The European Invasion In Computer Science

Kay: You should talk to William Newman, since he's here. He was part of 
the British brain-drain. There was also Christopher Strachey, whom I 
consider one of the top 10 computer scientists of all time. The British 
appreciate him. They also had Peter Landin. They had memory management 
and they had timesharing before we did. Then there was a crisis in the 
early 1960s. And suddenly the young Brits were coming to the United 
States.

 William was one of the guys who literally wrote the book on computer 
graphics: Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics with Robert 
Sproull. William came to Harvard and was Ivan Sutherland's graduate 
student — got his Ph.D. in 1965 or 1966. William followed Ivan out to 
Utah; then when Xerox PARC was set up, William came to PARC.

A similar thing happened, but I think for different reasons, in France. 
So one of the things we benefited from is that we got these incredibly 
well-prepared Brits and French guys reacting to the kind of 
devil-may-care attitude, and funding like nobody had ever seen before. 
These guys were huge contributors. For example, the first outline fonts 
were done by Patrick Baudelaire at PARC, who got his Ph.D. at Utah. The 
shading on 3D is named Gouraud shading after Henri Gouraud, who was also 
at Utah — also under Ivan, when Ivan was there.

# Computing as Pop Culture

Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for 
their work.

Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in 
history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes 
computing not-quite-a-field.

Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture.

Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed 
music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to 
over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of 
the 19th century. The big problem with our culture is that it's being 
dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited 
for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture 
content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. 
Anything that's been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the 
next couple levels.

Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep 
pleasure in knowing the history of jazz.

Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a 
disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like 
you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or 
the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of 
most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their 
culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people 
think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than 
something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a 
scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. 
The Web was done by amateurs.

# The Browser — A Lament

Binstock: Still, you can't argue with the Web's success.

Kay: I think you can.

Binstock: Well, look at Wikipedia — it's a tremendous collaboration.

Kay: It is, but go to the article on Logo, can you write and execute 
Logo programs? Are there examples? No. The Wikipedia people didn't even 
imagine that, in spite of the fact that they're on a computer. That's 
why I never use PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just simulated acetate 
overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime. That's why 
I always do, not just dynamic stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff 
that I'm interacting with on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer 
is for. People who don't do that either don't understand that or don't 
respect it.

The marketing people are not there to teach people, so probably one of 
the most disastrous interactions with computing was the fact that you 
could make money selling simulations of old, familiar media, and these 
apps just swamped most of the ideas of Doug Engelbart, for example. The 
Web browser, for many, many years, and still, even though it's running 
on a computer that can do X, Y, and Z, it's now up to about X and 1/2 of 
Y.

Binstock: How do you mean?

Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like 
Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1974. HyperCard was 1989. Find me 
Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after 
that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just 
trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, 
except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution 
squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really 
bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web 
browser is any features.

Binstock: "Any features?"

Kay: Yeah. You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a 
mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as 
an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101.

Binstock: How so?

Kay: I mean, look at it: The job of an operating system is to run 
arbitrary code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you 
can run. Most operating systems have way too many features. The nice 
thing about UNIX when it was first done is not just that there were only 
20 system commands, but the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. 
This is true of Linux also.

Binstock: Yes.

Kay: One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is 
slowly showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of 
interacting with the computer than the way they first did it. So of 
course they're going to reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, 
if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not 
reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd 
personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd 
be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way 
ahead of where we are now.

# Objects

Kay: The flaw there is probably the fact that C is early-bound. Because 
it's not late-bound, because it's not a dynamic system, pretty much the 
only way you can link in features is to link them in ahead of time. 
Remember when we had to boot the computer? There's no need for that. 
There's never been any need for it. Because they did it that way, you 
wind up with megabytes of features that are essentially bundled together 
whether you want them or not. And now a thousand system calls, where 
what you really want is objects that are migrating around the net, and 
when you need a resource, it comes to you — no operating system. We 
didn't use an operating system at PARC. We didn't have applications 
either.

Binstock: So it was just an object loader?

Kay: An object exchanger, really. The user interface's job was to ask 
objects to show themselves and to composite those views with other ones.

Binstock: You really radicalized the idea of objects by making 
everything in the system an object.

Kay: No, I didn't. I mean, I made up the term "objects." Since we did 
objects first, there weren't any objects to radicalize. We started off 
with that view of objects, which is exactly the same as the view we had 
of what the Internet had to be, except in software. What happened was 
retrograde. When C++ came out, they tried to cater to C programmers, and 
they made a system that was neither fish nor fowl. And that's true of 
most of the things that are called object-oriented systems today. None 
of them are object-oriented systems according to my definition. Objects 
were a radical idea, then they got retrograded.

Binstock: How do you view the Actor model?

Kay: The first Smalltalk was presented at MIT, and Carl Hewitt and his 
folks, a few months later, wrote the first Actor paper. The difference 
between the two systems is that the Actor model retained more of what I 
thought were the good features of the object idea, whereas at PARC, we 
used Smalltalk to invent personal computing. It was actually a practical 
programming language as well as being interesting theoretically. I don't 
think there were too many practical systems done in Actors back then.

# Programming

Binstock: Are you still programming?

Kay: I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more 
powerful programming languages. I do two kinds of programming. I do what 
you could call metaprogramming, and programming as children from the age 
of 9 to 13 or 14 would do. I spend a lot of time thinking about what 
children at those developmental levels can actually be powerful at, and 
what's the tradeoff between…Education is a double-edged sword. You have 
to start where people are, but if you stay there, you're not educating.

The most disastrous thing about programming — to pick one of the 10 most 
disastrous things about programming — there's a very popular movement 
based on pattern languages. When Christopher Alexander first did that in 
architecture, he was looking at 2,000 years of ways that humans have 
made themselves comfortable. So there was actually something to it, 
because he was dealing with a genome that hasn't changed that much. I 
think he got a few hundred valuable patterns out of it. But the bug in 
trying to do that in computing is the assumption that we know anything 
at all about programming. So extracting patterns from today's 
programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve. It 
actually gives them more cachet.

The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester 
destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. 
He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we 
were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn 
everything, but then he destroyed it. He wanted us to understand what 
had been done, but he didn't want us to believe in it.

Binstock: Who was that?

Kay: That was Bob Barton, who was the designer of the Burroughs B5000. 
He's at the top of my list of people who should have received a Turing 
Award but didn't. The award is given by the Association for Computing 
Machinery (ACM), so that is ridiculous, but it represents the academic 
bias and software bias that the ACM has developed. It wasn't always that 
way. Barton was probably the number-one person who was alive who 
deserved it. He died last year, so it's not going to happen unless they 
go to posthumous awards.

Binstock: I don't think they do that.

Kay: They should. It's like the problem Christian religions have with 
how to get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless 
you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so 
this is a huge problem. But only the Mormons have solved this — and they 
did it. They proxy-baptized Socrates.

Binstock: I didn't realize that. One can only imagine how thankful 
Socrates must be.

Kay: I thought it was pretty clever. It solves a thorny problem that the 
other churches haven't touched in 2,000 years.

# Group Work

Kay: Have you interviewed Vint Cerf?

Binstock: No.

Kay: He's a very special guy. Not just for brains. He's one of the 
better organizers of people. If you had to point to one person, given 
that the Internet was a community effort, the one who made that 
community work was Vint. And he also was the co-guy on TCP/IP. I love 
him. I've known him for years. He runs a pretty tough, pretty organized 
meeting, but he does it so well that everyone likes it.

[Digression on who, in addition to Cerf, should have won various 
computing prizes…]

The prizes aren't a thing that Dr. Dobb's worries about, because prizes 
are mostly for individuals, not for teams that are trying to do serious 
engineering projects. The dynamics are very different. A lot of people 
go into computing just because they are uncomfortable with other people. 
So it is no mean task to put together five different kinds of Asperger's 
syndrome and get them to cooperate. American business is completely 
fucked up because it is all about competition. Our world was built for 
the good from cooperation. That is what they should be teaching.

Binstock: That's one of the few redeeming things about athletics.

Kay: Absolutely! No question. Team sports. It's the closest analogy. 
Everyone has to play the game, but some people are better at certain 
aspects.