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comment by lm
lm  ·  2605 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Alan Kay is not impressed with modern computing

The thing that catches me the most about this article is the way Kay rejects the popular framing of "entertainment XOR education" and the emphasis that we should be building tools that encourage people to use them in advanced/novel ways.

I don't know really how to do this practically, but it's something I'm going to be thinking about a lot.





Devac  ·  2605 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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lm  ·  2605 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think there's more to it than bringing skills (hardware, python) to people. Modern hardware isn't made to be hacked, and I'd wager that almost no amount of Python education will help you learn to use your iPhone more effectively. Most modern closed-source software is pretty user-hostile if you want to do anything more than exactly what the authors intended.

For examples of hardware that's made with modification in mind, see the Chumby or the Novena or the Chip. For software...that was kind of the selling point of Smalltalk, I think? Also Lisp machines--basically, an environment that doesn't really draw a distinction between "programming" and "using".

Devac  ·  2604 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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