Very interesting interview with Alan Kay

[Peter Gibbons]

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

The PDF version is right below the title:
"A Conversation with Alan Kay"
Download it.

This small quote doesn't do a justice to this interview:

Alan Kay:

Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

I realized that anytime I want to know what I’m doing, I can just write down the kernel of this thing in a half page and it’s not going to lose any power. In fact, it’s going to gain power by being able to reenter itself much more readily than most systems done the other way can possibly do.

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

[Walter Mitty]

It is, however, a great quote.  I particularly like the analogy of "the Maxwell's Equations of Saoftware".

[Walter Mitty]

One interesting quote I saw from Alan Kay is:

I don't like data structures.

Unlike Alan, I do like data structures.  However, I don't like them so much that I'd like to invent 50 different data structures where five will do the trick.

I think that's what's wrong with data structure design.  Not enough emphasis on generics.