A great Alan Kay quote

[jfj]

Peter Hansen wrote:
> Grant Edwards wrote:
> 
>> In an interview at 
>> http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
>> Alan Kay said something I really liked, and I think it applies
>> equally well to Python as well as the languages mentioned:
>>
>>     I characterized one way of looking at languages in this
>>     way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features
>>     or they're a crystallization of style. Languages such as
>>     APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style
>>     languages, where there's a real center and imputed style to
>>     how you're supposed to do everything.
>>
>> I think that "a crystallization of style" sums things up nicely.
>> The rest of the interview is pretty interesting as well.
> 
> 
> Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
> be considered a "crystallization of features"...

Bah. My impressions from the interview was "there are no good
languages anymore. In my time we made great languages, but today
they all suck. Perl for example...."
I got the impressions that the interview is as bad for python
as for perl and any of the languages of the 90's and 00's.

 From the interview:
""" You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the 
good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much 
faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 
years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to 
what happened when television came on the scene and some of its 
inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the 
masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have 
more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to 
do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of 
real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
"""

So, let's not be so self-important <winkus>, and see this interview
as one who bashes perl and admires python. It aint. Python is pop
culture according to Mr Kay. I'll leave the rest to slashdot..


jfj