> McCarthy looked at those and he said every house is going to
have one of these. And he didn't worry about personal computing
or anything because what he thought—what the thing that occurred
to him—this is like getting your power from the outside, this is
like getting your water from the outside, it's going to be a
utility. It'll be a universal utility, be like the telephone.
Everybody will have one of these things and there will be national
Computing centers that everybody can tap into. And he started
thinking about it and he realized: oh, the problem is nobody can
deal with computers on the computer's terms. We need a common
sense way of dealing with computation. And so he proposed that
there be an agent called the advice taker that you could have
back and forth with, and not just ask it questions but tell it
things and have it reason. And there's a whole bunch of
interesting stuff in there.
By Kay's own logic in this talk, Smalltalk-76/80 should also be on his "naughty list" alongside C++ and Java. Only Smalltalk-72 is somewhat comparable to Erlang's message passing (though it technically neither fits Kay's "active independent cell" model because of its synchronous, blocking, and single-threaded execution). Ironically, Erlang's model better fits Kay's view than any Smalltalk version, but Armstrong explicitly states in the interview that he was oblivious to Kay's (and also Hewitt's) model at the time when he created Erlang (he was guided by Prolog and Hoare's CSP instead).
> McCarthy looked at those and he said every house is going to have one of these. And he didn't worry about personal computing or anything because what he thought—what the thing that occurred to him—this is like getting your power from the outside, this is like getting your water from the outside, it's going to be a utility. It'll be a universal utility, be like the telephone. Everybody will have one of these things and there will be national Computing centers that everybody can tap into. And he started thinking about it and he realized: oh, the problem is nobody can deal with computers on the computer's terms. We need a common sense way of dealing with computation. And so he proposed that there be an agent called the advice taker that you could have back and forth with, and not just ask it questions but tell it things and have it reason. And there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff in there.
This part reminded me of CLI Agents
Has beed discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13033299
By Kay's own logic in this talk, Smalltalk-76/80 should also be on his "naughty list" alongside C++ and Java. Only Smalltalk-72 is somewhat comparable to Erlang's message passing (though it technically neither fits Kay's "active independent cell" model because of its synchronous, blocking, and single-threaded execution). Ironically, Erlang's model better fits Kay's view than any Smalltalk version, but Armstrong explicitly states in the interview that he was oblivious to Kay's (and also Hewitt's) model at the time when he created Erlang (he was guided by Prolog and Hoare's CSP instead).