Saturday

On Saturday, I started out on reddit.com. Things seemed a little silly there so I moved on to programming.reddit.com. Nothing was really standing out but I rather enjoyed my read of The Architecture of Mailinator.

Then I happened to see this: Magic Ink. It's a pretty long, but kinda pretty article I thought (well, the font size could be increased, but most graphic designers yell when I say this). I didn't know if I had the time to do the article justice. You see, if an article is nicely formatted, and it's apparent the author spent some time making it so, then I assume that they spent an equal or greater amount of time thinking about its contents. So, in my world, pretty article = good article. I do read ugly articles, but they have to win me over in the first couple paragraphs (ironic considering this blog entry, eh?).

But it's still long, so I started with the damn fine pictures that immediately jumped out at me. I love the Amazon book search results, his movie time sheet, and his BART navigation software. Stunning! Go look now! (Why doesn't my software look that good? Oh yeah, I spend too much time thinking about improving the code than I do thinking about the UI...)

The author had me impressed. At this point, the article could be a big pile of Microspeak for all I cared - at least he sparked my imagination with his pictures.

I still wasn't sure whether to devote time to the article so I decided to investigate the author (talk about ADD). Turns out that he is a pretty prolific developer with a good eye for design. Check out his latest shirt design software - text entry is a little buggy but I found the whole experience very enjoyable.

So he's won me over, it's now time to read that article! Of wait, what's this? A quote from Alan Kay that I haven't read yet? A link to a video presentation? Uh, oh, more distraction!

Honestly, I haven't read much from Mr. Kay, but I am a big fan of his quotes. Given all those great memories, a video presentation must be worth the viewing.

It absolutely was worth the viewing. Though he speaks quite slowly (even with the video played in fast-forward) every minute (or fast-forward pseudo-minute) is well worth your time. Some of the most memorable ideas I got from it include:

• Bob Barton was a pioneer in matching computer architectures (hardware) to software. The B5000 is such an example, the Alto seems to be another. Mr. Kay has a slide showing The Descriptor that intrigued me enough to surf around and find it. Now I just need to read it. I have been interested in these types of machines ever sense reading about the Scheme interpreters put into hardware - the electrical engineer in me gets all excited.
• The Molecular Biology of the Cell as a very good book that uses strong fundamentals to take non-biologists/chemists all the way up to being pretty knowledgeable of the cell. Wow, if that sentence doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will! I just have a fascination with these types of books, from SICP to SICM, from QED to On Intelligence, from The Molecular Biology of the Cell to, well, I don't know yet.
• Squeak is 250,000 lines of code compared to Windows' 50,000,000 lines. That's a huge difference! Obviously Windows is doing a bit more, but is it really doing 200 times more?
• He wants to bring 250,000 down to 20,000. Impossible? Maybe. However I am quite excited about the idea. A single person can comprehend 20,000 lines of code, but they cannot (or I cannot) comprehend 250,000 nor 50,000,000.
• Objects from the bottom to the top! From drivers up to presentation slide elements. Everything is programmable and extensible. (Again, from the proposal.)
• Objects done right. Instead of C++ or .NET's concept of objects, systems should be based upon agents using message passing. As one of the devotees who saw the light with Erlang and can see where that technology can go, this is is very exciting to me.
• Objects done simply. Checkout the bootstrapper. It's so simple!
• The Golden Box. I wish Mr. Kay had given better references, but if you search around Ian P.'s work enough, you can find what he's talking about. God I want a Golden Box.

So my viewing of an hour and a half video took me 4 hours (even when watching parts in fast-forward!), and I still hadn't even read the Magic Ink article!

That was my Saturday.

Yes, I did finally read the article, and it was completely worth it. I recommend you do the same.