Alan Kay






 * "Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." (Alan Kay.)


 * "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay in 1971)

Introduction
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist. He was a child prodigy, and was a National Quiz Kid at age ten. He is known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming, laptop computers, graphical user interfaces, and dedication to improving the education of children.

Quoting from the introduction to a 2004 interview:


 * Kay was one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network client-servers.

Kay's 1968 Master's Thesis at the University of Utah is titled, FLEX—A Flexible Extendable Language. His 1969 doctoral dissertation at the University of Utah is titled, The Reactive Engine.

Here is a paragraph from his doctoral dissertation. It provides good insight into a philosophy that has guided him throughout his career.


 * A good class project for undergraduates who have not become too tainted with either the commercial or research computing milieu, is to have them design a computer system for a “think tank” such as RAND or the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. It is delightfully nebulous question, since they quickly realize it will be impossible for them to even discover what the majority of the thinkers are doing. Indeed, many of the researchers will not know themselves or be able to articulate that state of mind of “just feeling around”. It is at this point that a wide philosophical division appears in the students. Almost all of them agree that there is really nothing that they can do for the scientists. The more engineering-minded of the students, seeing no hard and fast solution, stop there. The rest, who are somewhat more fanciful in their thoughts, say “…maybe ‘nothing’ is exactly the right thing to deliver, providing it is served up in the proper package”. They have articulated an important thought. Not being able to solve any one scientist’s problems, they nevertheless feel that they can provide tools in which the “thinker” can describe his own solutions and that these tools need not treat specifically any given area of discourse. Bold added for emphasis.

Much of Alan Kay's professional work in the computer field has been guided by the idea of providing powerful tools to children and giving them an education in which there is value in learning to make use of these tools.

Kay's Xerox PARC Years
The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was founded in 1970 and incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in 1972. Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * It is best known for inventing laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer graphical user interface (GUI) paradigm, ubiquitous computing, and advancing very-large-scale-integration (VLSI).




 * PARC has been the incubator of many elements of modern computing. Most were included in the Alto, which introduced and unified most aspects of now-standard personal computer usage model: the mouse[1], computer generated color graphics, a graphical user interface featuring windows and icons, the WYSIWYG text editor, InterPress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), Ethernet, and fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment. The laser printer was developed at the same time, as an integral part of the overall environment.

Alan Kay joined the Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center in 1970. Thus, he was deeply involved in the work described above. He made major contributions to the development of graphical user interface, the design of laptop computers, and the object-oriented language Smalltalk. The picture at the left shows Alan Kay holding up a 1968 cardboard prototype of the Dynabook laptop computer. The picture is from a 2006 celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Dynabook.

Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * The Dynabook concept was created by Alan Kay in 1968, two years before the founding of Xerox PARC. Kay wanted to make “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.” The ideas led to the development of the Xerox Alto prototype, which was originally called “the interim Dynabook”.[1][2] It embodied all the elements of a graphical user interface, or GUI, as early as 1972. The software component of this research was Smalltalk, which went on to have a life of its own independent of the Dynabook concept.


 * The Dynabook concept described what is now known as a laptop computer or, (in some of its other incarnations) a tablet PC or slate computer with nearly eternal battery life and software aimed at giving children access to digital media. Adults could also use a Dynabook, but the target audience was children.

Smalltalk
Hutchison, James 7/7/2010). A to Z of programming languages: Smalltalk-80. Computerworld. Retrieved 7/14/2010 from http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/352182/z_programming_languages_smalltalk-80/. Quoting from the article:


 * Computerworld Australia is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. We most recently spoke to Brad Cox, the man behind everyone's favourite Apple-flavoured language – Objective-C. Make sure to check out The A to Z of programming languages index to find them all.:: This week, we take a look at the pre-cursor to Objective-C and the foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80. One of the men behind the language, Alan Kay, is credited not only with helping to develop the language, but also the invention of object-oriented programming as a concept, and even inventing a personal computer concept that has eerie similarities to the iPad.


 * Smalltalk-80 was one of several Smalltalk languages Kay helped to shape while at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre, now known simply as PARC. The languages focussed on personal computing – a topic Kay still feels strongly about – and here he expands on how the work came about, the state of innovation in the modern era and the love for education he continues to hold.:: Alan, you're credited with inventing the phrase "object-oriented programming (OOP)". Did the concept exist at all at the time?


 * I did make up this term (and it was a bad choice because it under-emphasized the more important idea of message sending). Part of the idea existed (in several systems). I could see that a more comprehensive basis could be made by going all the way to thinking of efficient whole virtual machines communicating only by messages. This would provide scaling, be a virtual version of what my research community, ARPA-IPTO [The Information Processing Techniques Office at the US Department of Defense's research facility] was starting to do with large scale networking, and also would have some powerful “algebraic” properties (like polymorphism).

Squeak
Squeak is a programming language based on the ideas of the Smalltalk programming language developed by Alan Kay. Kay was a major contributor to the Squeak project.

Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80 by a group at Apple Computer that included some of the original Smalltalk-80 developers. Its development was continued by the same group at Walt Disney Imagineering, where it was intended for use in internal Disney projects. Some Squeak users refer to Squeak as a programming language rather than as a Smalltalk implementation. It is object-oriented, class-based, and reflective. Squeak is available for many platforms, and programs produced on one platform run bit-identical on all other platforms. The Squeak system includes code for generating a new version of the virtual machine (VM) on which it runs. It also includes a VM simulator written in itself (Squeak). For this reason, it is easily ported.

Alan Kay presents some general ideas and philosophy of Squeak in his talk, What is Squeak? In essence, this is a talk about what is a real subject that children can learn, and how do we teach it to children. It is a talk about curriculum, and how to develop curriculum that is meaningful and real to children and to our current and future world.

Squeak is open source software, available free for a wide range of computers. Quoting from the Squeak Website, some current uses of Squeak include:


 * Children's Machine - The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative leverages Squeak to power the Etoys application shipped with every laptop around the world.


 * Etoys is a powerful script-based environment to learn science and math by encouraging exploration and experimentation.


 * Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated dynamic web applications by using Continuations dramatically easing the complexity of web application development.


 * Croquet is an open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative 3D multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users.


 * Sophie is a digital media assembly tool to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document such as slideshows, presentations and annotated videos.


 * Scratch is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art -- and share their creations with one another over the Net. Scratch builds on the tradition of Logo and LEGO/Logo, but takes advantage of new computational ideas to make it easier to get started with programming (lowering the floor) and extend the range of what kids can create and learn (raising the ceiling).

Music
Alan Kay grew up in a home and school musical environment. For a number of years, up through completing his bachelor's degree in mathematics and molecular biology, he worked as a professional musician, playing keyboard instruments and as a jazz guitarist.

The first part of the following video gives information into his background in music.


 * Kay, Alan (2003). Education in the digital age. (27:45) Retrieved 1/5/09: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521&hl=en.

Music has strongly influenced Kay's professional work in the computer field and in educational uses of computers. For example, here is his response to a question about the poor progress in CAI.


 * "The piano has been the biggest thing to turn millions of people away from music for the rest of their lives. All musicians know that the music is not in the piano."

His basic idea is, "We need a curriculum based on ideas rather than media." Children need to be immersed in an environment of doing things and making use of their learning."

Quoting from a 2003 interview:


 * Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It's like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won't give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.


 * On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don't need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don't have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.


 * The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Alan Kay and Seymour Papert
Alan Kay first encountered Seymour Papert in 1968. In writing and talking about what he learned by observing Papert's use of LOGO in schools, Alan Kay indicates:


 * "... this encounter finally hit me with what the destiny of personal computing really was going to be. Not a personal dynamic vehicle, as in Engelbart's metaphor opposed to IBM 'railroads', but something much more profound: a personal dynamic medium. With a vehicle one could wait until high school and give 'drivers ed', but if it was a medium, it had to extend into the world of childhood."

Here are two quotes from a 2003 interview of Alan Kay:


 * Q: What have you found to be the greatest obstacle in your work?


 * A: I think the most difficult part is helping the helpers. Logo was a great idea and it failed. It didn't fail because computers couldn't do Logo, and it didn't fail because Logo software was bad. It failed because the second and third waves of teachers were not interested in it as a new thing, and virtually none of them understood anything about mathematics or science. It's very hard to teach Logo well if you don't know math. But one of our ways around it this time is that the Internet is getting mature enough to do some of the online mentoring ideas we'd had a long time ago. Our idea is to extend the one-room schoolhouse to the entire world.


 * Q: What do you think of the current trend toward one-to-one computing in schools, in which every kid has his or her own laptop or handheld?


 * A: Well, that's why I invented the idea of the Dynabook [Kay's 1968 prototype for a wirelessly networked, multimedia laptop]. That's the whole point of that concept. As Seymour Papert once pointed out, just imagine the absurdity of a school that has only two pencils in each classroom. Or imagine a school where all the pencils are locked up in a special room.


 * But I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It's basically just tokenism, and schools just won't face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.

Teaching and Education
Douglass Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Seymour Papert (together with many other people) talk about use of technology for amplification (to essentially do what we already know how to do) and moving beyond amplification. They view a computer as a tool to move beyond amplification.

Kay often points out how long it took for the use of books printed using Gutenberg (1398–1468) movable type technology to have a significant impact on our educational system. At the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865) perhaps 10% of the population was literate.

Quoting from a 2003 Scholastic interview:


 * Q: Well, what should 21st-century education be about?


 * A: The most critical thing about the 20th and 21st centuries is that there's a bunch of new invented ideas—many of them connected with modern civilization—that our nervous systems are not at all set up to automatically understand. Equal rights, for example. Or calculus. You won't find these ideas in ancient or traditional societies.


 * If you take all the anthropological universals and lay them out, those are the things that you can expect children to learn from their environment—and they do. But the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we're not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing.


 * Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.


 * Q: Why hasn't educational computing lived up to the potential that you and Papert saw in the 1960s?


 * A: Don't even worry about computers yet. When did math and science actually start becoming important for everyone in our society to know? Probably 200 years ago. Now think about how poorly math and science are being taught in elementary school today. So don't even worry about computers; instead, worry about how long it takes for something that is known to be incredibly important to get into the elementary-school curriculum. That's the answer. Of course it's taking forever—because the adults are the intermediaries, and they don't like math and science.

Quoting from a 2004 interview:


 * Like I said, it’s a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn’t have to have any particular musical merits. I think a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditious gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.




 * I don’t spend time complaining about this stuff, because what happened in the last 20 years is quite normal, even though it was unfortunate. Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. It’s well known that I tried to kill Smalltalk in the later ’70s. There were a few years when it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It answered needs in a more compact and beautiful way than anything that had been done before. But time moves on. As we learned more and got more ambitious about what we wanted to do, we realized that there are all kinds of things in Smalltalk that don’t scale the way they should—for instance, the reflection stuff that we had in there. It was one of the first languages to really be able to see itself, but now it is known how to do all levels of reflection much better—so we should implement that.

A key idea expressed here is learning that will last a long time. For example, suppose one learns to express oneself quite well on a piano. The music is in the person, not in the instrument. But, both the instrument and the music in the person have a long life span. Moreover, the music within a person will last a lifetime and can be transferred to other instruments. Note, however, this transfer process may not be easy. Alan Kay is an accomplished musician. In his later life, he decided to learn to play the pipe organ. He notes that it took him an hour a day of practice, for five to seven years, to reach a level of performance that he found to be satisfying.

Kay suggests we view a computer as a kind of language machine—a dynamic language machine rather than static like a book. Here is a way to think about this:


 * Informal education before the development of agriculture. (Before 9,000 BC, no books, no written language.)
 * Education—mostly informal, but some formal—to work in an agricultural environment, before the development of reading and writing. (Before about 3,000 BC; no books, but use of clay tokens with picture symbols on then.)
 * Formal education to learn abstract symbol systems such as writing and math. (Beginning in Sumer about 5,200 years ago. Formal schooling to teach a select few to read and write.)
 * Each emerging discipline of research and study develops some of its own special vocabulary and abstract symbol systems. (As disciplines grow broader and deeper, it becomes more difficult for a novice to understand the communication among higher level expert is in a discipline. Problem solving in a discipline becomes more and more discipline-specific.)
 * Formal schooling for the masses. (Prompted by the industrial revolution beginning about 200 years ago. (There is considerable agreement nowadays of the need for literacy for all. However, rapid growth in breadth and depth of many disciplines—an information explosion—is overwhelming the learning capabilities of even the best learners.
 * Recent emergence of computers—a new type of book that provides powerful aids to the appropriately educated user. (Our current education system is being overwhelmed by #4 and #5.)

In discussing computer literacy, Alan Kay used an analogy with reading and writing literacy. There, he notes, we have:


 * Access literacy (reading). We have the technological and productivity know how to provide ICT facilities to all students.
 * Creative Literacy (writing). Efforts to help the general population gain a type of ICT writing literacy have been unsuccessful. Application-specific software makes it seem to most people that they have little need to move to a deeper level in using computers to represent and solve challenging problem.
 * Literature (General Literacy). This includes being able to access and understand writings of the past and some of the different genera of writing. This idea is somewhat akin to computational thinking in the various disciplines that one studies.

Relatively few people are computer literate according to this type of definition. Thus, for example, being good at playing computer games or text messaging via a cell phone is a far cry from being computer literate.

There is a lot of literature on computer literacy, and many different definitions of the term. See, for example, Arthur Luehrmann's 1980 paper, Should the computer teach the student, or vice versa? For another example, see Moursund's 1983 booklet, Precollege computer Literacy: A Personal Computing Approach.

Alan Kay Quotations

 * Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. [This refers to the idea of having an appropriate data structure or other representational system in representing a problem helps a great deal in solving the problem.]


 * It [the computer] is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
 * It (the computer) is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools.


 * Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.


 * Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should.


 * Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws! (Alan Kay in 1971.)


 * After observing Papert's use of LOGO in schools in 1968, "...this encounter finally hit me with what the destiny of personal computing really was going to be. Not a personal dynamic vehicle, as in Engelbart's metaphor opposed to IBM 'railroads', but something much more profound: a personal dynamic medium. With a vehicle one could wait until high school and give 'drivers ed', but if it was a medium, it had to extend into the world of childhood."


 * To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.


 * What would a computer be if it were like a pencil?


 * Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.


 * The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. Even more important, it is fun, and therefore intrinsically worth doing. ... Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score, whose interpretation amplifies our reach and lifts our spirit. Leonardo da Vinci called music ``the shaping of the invisible, 'and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software. -Alan Kay, ``Computer Software', Scientific American, September 1984

Videos
Kay, Alan (12/31/1987). Doing with images makes symbols (1:36:54). Retrieved 1/5/09: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-533537336174204822.


 * The first few seconds of the video seem to be messed up, but the video is fine when it reaches Alan Kay's presentation. The video includes an excellent introduction to the history of desktop computers and computer graphics. It includes video of the work of other pioneers such as Ivan Sutherland, Douglass Engelbart, Seymour Papert, and Adel Goldberg.

Kay, Alan (1997). The Computer “Revolution” Hasn’t Happened Yet! Keynote address: OOPSLA 1997. (1:04) Retrieved 1/5/09: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521&hl=en

Kay, Alan (1998). The Computer “Revolution” Hasn’t Happened Yet! EDUCOM ’98. Retrieved 1/8/2009: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/TheComputerRevolutionHasn/32673.

Kay, Alan (2003). Education in the digital age. (27:45) Retrieved 1/5/09: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521&hl=en.


 * This video provides excellent insight into how computers can be used to improve education. The underlying basic idea is that the computer is a mind tool that helps the mind to solve problems and accomplish tasks that cannot be done by the mind alone.


 * About 56 minutes into this video, there is video on Tim Gollwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis. That video segment is also available at http://www.theinnergame.com/.

Kay, Alan (2004).[What is Squeak? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6605997857319097923&hl=en What is Squeak?] This 68 minute video is about improving education through use of a programming language and environment called Squeak. Quoting from the Squeak website:


 * Squeak is a modern, open source, full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment. Squeak is highly-portable - even its virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development.

Awards and Honors
Turing Award (2004).


 * ACM has named Alan Kay the winner of the 2003 Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, an influential programming language that used object-oriented concepts, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing. Smalltalk, the first complete dynamic object-oriented programming language, included a revolutionary visual authoring environment that is now common in computer applications. Dr. Kay, a Senior Fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs since 2002, is President of Viewpoints Research Institute, which he founded in 2001. The Turing Award carries a $100,000 prize, with funding provided by Intel Corporation.

Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering.

Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, awarded every four years by the Inamori Foundation.

Elected Fellow of:


 * American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
 * National Academy of Engineering,
 * Royal Society of Arts,
 * Computer History Museum.

Honorary doctorates:


 * 2002: Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm.
 * 2005: Georgia Institute of Technology.
 * 2005: Columbia College Chicago.
 * 2007: Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica - Università di Pisa, Italy.
 * 2008: University of Waterloo

Comment by David Moursund 1/5/09
Over the years I have had an opportunity to attend several presentations by Alan Kay, to present at some of the same conferences as Alan Kay, and to participate jointly with him on a panel at a conference. He is an amazing person! He is open to new ideas, gracious in interacting with others and sharing ideas, and absolutely full of deep, future-oriented ideas.

Author or Authors
The initial version of this page was developed by David Moursund.