Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols (Full Version)

> (see also Alan Kay's vision of software inspired by biological cells and systems – lots of talk, no non-trivial proofs of concept). I just wanted to say that actually Kay's vision was implemented in something very non-trivial, both on the hardware side - Alto, and the Smalltalk operating system. They were used by real people and exhibited lots of traits that this article talks about. And some of their ideas were hugely influential in mainstream computing. I love the demo of one of the Smalltalk programs in this talk by Alan Kay [0], starts at around 40:30 [0] - ▶ this video

Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js "wat" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general "best of", I'd expect something like Guy Steele "growing a language" : link Douglas Engelbart "the mother of all demos": link Alan Kay "doing with images makes symbols": ▶ this video Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: "a powerful idea about teaching ideas": link (Maybe that's not a "tech talk"?) Rich Hickey "simple made easy" : link To name a few of the top of my head.

> Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil. There is a classic Alan Kay talk that touches on this very issue, called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It discusses what the true power of HCI really is: that complex ideas (or even "unthinkable" ones) can be expressed via HCI using some combination of visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic reasoning. The whole talk is well worth watching, but here is the part I feel is most relevant for Victor's point: ▶ this video