TITLE: A Book on Alan Kay / Alan Kay on Science and Engineering
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 25, 2010  4:16 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Everyone already seems to know about this, but I didn't
until yesterday, when I saw a note from Hal Perkins...

In honor of Alan Kay's 70th birthday, a bunch of his
colleagues and best friends have published
<A HREF="http://vpri.org/pov/">
   Points of View</A>,
"a collection of previously-unpublished essays".  The
list of authors ranges from CS greats such as Ivan
Sutherland, Butler Lampson, and Leonard Kleinrock, to
luminaries from other human endeavors such as Betty
Edwards and Quincy Jones.  The list of essay titles
makes me want to drop all of my work and read it from
cover to cover right now.  There may be a second
printing of the book, but it is available in PDF from
the website for free.

Very cool.

I've been meaning to post a short snippet from Kay for
the last few weeks.  He wrote a
<A HREF="http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/">
   guest entry</A>
on Mark Guzdial's blog about the danger of trying to
make learning 'too simple', a common theme in how Kay
talks about understanding and building systems.  The
passage that really attracted me was on something
else, though, in a comment responding to other
commenters' comments.  Considering that Kay's blog
entry itself began as a comment intended for another
entry, we have more than enough indirection to make
us computer scientists happy for weeks!

In his comment, Kay describes some of his team's
current work at Viewpoints, in which they extract
from programs of millions of code an essential core
that is executable, readable, and yet several orders
of magnitude smaller than the original.  He uses this
description as a vehicle for explaining science and
engineering:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
In this direction -- where we have phenomena already,
and our task is to make a much more compact,
understandable and debuggable model -- we are doing
actual science (this is what science does and is).

But we can also use the model idea to go in the other
direction -- to come up with an idea, make a runnable
debuggable model of it -- and then use this as a guide
and reference ... for manifesting the ... artifact --
here, we are doing invention and engineering.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Computer scientists are often asked to explain why CS
is a science.  Kay has always been very clear that
science is about method, not subject matter.  His
explanation of science and engineering nicely captures
how CS can be science, how CS can be engineering, and
how CS <EM>can be both</EM>.  The last these is part
of what distinguishes computer science from other
disciplines, precisely because CS is about models of
systems.

For me, this simple example was the big win from Kay's
guest post on Mark's blog.  It's also a fitting
example of how Kay thinks about the world and why
accomplished people would take the time to write essays
to celebrate his birthday.
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