The Future of Programming

http://worrydream.com/dbx/

- Technology moves quickly, but people's mind moves slowly
- Furious at students wasting computing time on assembly, that could have been doing manually

coding -> direct manipulation of data "direct manipulation vs. markup language"
procedure -> goals and constrains "expressing the programm on what you want vs. how"
- Programming goal. Different program that can communicate with each other; they will figure out procedure that can achieve the high level goal vs. API (1. have to know each other 2. dependent 3. human that doing doing low level work)

text dump -> spatial representation
- Smalltalk: representing text spatially
- Interactive design


sequential (actor model) -> concurrent (threads and locks)

Actor model: every program is doing its own thing, interact with people nearby. (Lisp?)

The real tragedy, is that people forget that there can be more way of programming.

Why all these good idea happened there? Because nobody knew what programing was, they just tried everything.

The most dangerous thing for a programming person, is to "think that they know what they are doing".

 "I don't know what I am doing."

Lastly, here's some advice Alan Kay gave me (as I was going through a small personal crisis as a result of reading Jerome Bruner's "Toward a Theory of Instruction"):
I think the trick with knowledge is to "acquire it, and forget all except the perfume" -- because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own "brain voices". The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.