Wikipedia

Alan Kay

For other people named Alan Kay, seeAlan Kay (disambiguation).
Not to be confused withAllan K..

Alan Curtis Kay(born May 17, 1940)[1]is an Americancomputer scientistwho pioneered work onobject-oriented programmingandwindowinggraphical user interface(GUI) design. AtXeroxPARChe led the design and development of the first modern windowedcomputer desktopinterface. There he also led the development of the influentialobject-orientedprogramming languageSmalltalk,both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences,theNational Academy of Engineering,and theRoyal Society of Arts.[2]He received theTuring Awardin 2003.[3]

Alan Kay
Alan Kay holding the prototype of theDynabook
Born
Alan Curtis Kay

(1940-05-17)May 17, 1940(age 84)
Springfield, Massachusetts,U.S.
EducationUniversity of Colorado at Boulder(BS)
University of Utah College of Engineering(MS,PhD)
Known forDynabook
Object-oriented programming
Smalltalk
Desktop metaphor
Graphical user interface
Windows
SpouseBonnie MacBird
AwardsACMTuring Award(2003)
Kyoto Prize
Charles Stark Draper Prize
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsXerox PARC
Stanford University
Atari Inc.
Apple Inc.ATG
Walt Disney Imagineering
UCLA
Kyoto University
MIT
Viewpoints Research Institute
Hewlett-PackardLabs
ThesisFLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language(1968)
Doctoral advisorsDavid C. Evans
Robert S. Barton
Notable studentsDavid Canfield Smith

Early life and work

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In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:

I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me.[4]

Originally fromSpringfield, Massachusetts,Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career inphysiologybefore ultimately settling in theNew York metropolitan area.

He attendedBrooklyn Technical High School.Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attendedBethany CollegeinBethany, West Virginia,where he majored inbiologyand minored in mathematics.

Kay then taught guitar inDenver,Colorado for a year. He was drafted in theUnited States Army,then qualified for officer training in theUnited States Air Force,where he became acomputer programmerafter passing an aptitude test.

After his discharge, he enrolled at theUniversity of Colorado Boulderand earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics andmolecular biologyin 1966.

In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at theUniversity of Utah College of Engineering.He earned aMaster of Scienceinelectrical engineeringin 1968, then aDoctor of Philosophyincomputer sciencein 1969. His doctoral dissertation,FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language,described the invention of acomputer languagenamedFLEX.[5][6][7]While there, he worked with "fathers ofcomputer graphics"David C. Evans(who had recently been recruited from theUniversity of California, Berkeleyto start Utah's computer science department) andIvan Sutherland(best known for writing such pioneering programs asSketchpad). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views onobjectsandcomputer programming.As he grew busier with research for theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA), he ended his musical career.

In 1968, he metSeymour Papertand learned of the programming languageLogo,adialectofLispoptimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work ofJean Piaget,Jerome Bruner,Lev Vygotsky,and ofconstructionist learning,further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for theMother of all Demos,a landmark computer demonstration byDouglas Engelbart.Even though he was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life".[8]

In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratoryin anticipation of accepting a professorship atCarnegie Mellon University.Instead, in 1970, he joined theXeroxPARCresearch staff inPalo Alto, California.Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming languageSmalltalk.

Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea ofobject-oriented programming(OOP), which he named.[9]Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed forSimula67 at theNorwegian Computing Center.Kay said:

I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging".[10]

While at PARC, Kay conceived theDynabookconcept, a key progenitor of laptop andtabletcomputers and thee-book.He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowinggraphical user interface(GUI).[11]Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered one of the first researchers intomobile learning;many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of theOne Laptop Per Childeducational platform,[12]with which Kay is actively involved.

Subsequent work

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From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist atAtari.In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow. After the closure of theApple Advanced Technology Groupin 1997,[13]he was recruited by his friendBran Ferren,head of research and development atDisney,to joinWalt Disney Imagineeringas a Disney Fellow. He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with ImagineerDanny Hillis,leading to the cessation of the Fellows program.

In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development. For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds inGlendale, California,where he and Ferren worked on various projects. Kay served as president of the Institute until its closure in 2018.

In 2002 Kay joinedHP Labsas a senior fellow,[14]departing when HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005.[15] He has been an adjunct professor ofcomputer scienceat theUniversity of California, Los Angeles,a visiting professor atKyoto University,and an adjunct professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). Kay served on the advisory board ofTTI/Vanguard.

Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet

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In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start theopen sourceSqueakversion ofSmalltalk.As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became theEtoyssystem. More recently he started, withDavid A. Smith,David P. Reed,Andreas Raab,Rick McGeer,Julian Lombardi,andMark McCahill,theCroquet Project,an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.

Tweak

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In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do.Andreas Raab,a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems.[16]The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface.Tweakadded mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting.[17]Its underlying object system isclass-based,but to users (during programming) it acts as if it wereprototype-based.Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.

The Children's Machine

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In November 2005, at theWorld Summit on the Information Society,the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $100 Laptop, theOne Laptop per Childprogram, the Children's Machine, and theXO-1.The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friendNicholas Negroponte,and is based on Kay'sDynabookideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.

Reinventing programming

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Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences withSketchpad,Simula,Smalltalk,and the bloated code of commercial software.

On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United StatesNational Science Foundation(NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium".[18]STEPS is arecursive acronymthat stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"[19]

Computer scientist Alan Kay

Personal life

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Kay is a former professionaljazz guitarist,composer, and theatrical designer.

He also is an amateur classicalpipe organist.[20]

Awards and honors

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Alan Kay receiving awards
Kyoto Prize
Turing Award

Kay has received many awards and honors, including:

  • UdK 01-Award inBerlin,Germany for pioneering theGUI;[21]J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize (2001)
  • Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado (2002)
  • ACMTuring Award"For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing"[1](2003)
  • Kyoto Prize;Charles Stark Draper PrizewithButler W. Lampson,Robert W. TaylorandCharles P. Thacker[22](2004)
  • UPEAbacusAward, for individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing and information disciplines (2012)
  • Honorary doctorates:
–Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan(Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm[23](2002)
–Georgia Institute of Technology[24](2005)
–Columbia College Chicagoawarded Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa[25](2005)
– Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica,Università di Pisa,Italy (2007)
–University of Waterloo[26](2008)
–Kyoto University(2009)
–Universidad de Murcia[27](2010)
–University of Edinburgh[28](2017)
– American Academy of Arts and Sciences
–National Academy of Engineeringfor inventing the concept of portable personal computing. (1997)
– Royal Society of Arts
– Computer History Museum "for his fundamental contributions to personal computing and human-computer interface development."[29](1999)
– Association for Computing Machinery "For fundamental contributions to personal computing and object-oriented programming."[30](2008)
–Hasso Plattner Institute[31][32](2011)

His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ab"ACM Turing Award".2003.published by theAssociation for Computing Machinery2012
  2. ^Kay, Alan (1997).The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet(Speech).
  3. ^"Alan Kay | Biography, Inventions, & Facts | Britannica".britannica.RetrievedMay 1,2023.
  4. ^"Interview with Alan Kay on education".The Generational Divide.The Davis Group.RetrievedMarch 5,2011.
  5. ^Kay, Alan (1968)."FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language"(PDF).University of Utah.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on February 8, 2017.
  6. ^Alesso, H. Peter; Smith, C.F. (2008).Connections: Patterns of Discovery.Wiley Series on Systems Engineering and Analysis, 29. John Wiley & Sons. p. 61.ISBN978-0-470-11881-8.RetrievedAugust 15,2015.
  7. ^Barnes, S. B."Alan Kay: Transforming the Computer Into a Communication Medium"(PDF).Engineering & Technology History Wiki. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on July 1, 2016.
  8. ^Kennedy, Pagan (2016).Inventology: How we dream up things that change the world.Boston: Mariner Books. p. 115.ISBN9780544811928.
  9. ^Ram, Stefan L. (July 23, 2003)."Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of" Object-Oriented Programming "(document)".Stefan L. Ram, Berlin, Germany.RetrievedFebruary 15,2024.
  10. ^"AlanKayOnMessaging".
  11. ^Bergin, Thomas J. Jr.; Gibson, Richard G. Jr. (1996).History of Programming Languages II.New York, NY: ACM Press, Addison-Wesley.doi:10.1145/234286.ISBN978-0-201-89502-5.
  12. ^History,One Laptop Per Child, archived fromthe originalon July 6, 2020,retrievedJuly 18,2020
  13. ^"Alan Kay".I Programmer.November 13, 2009.
  14. ^Fordahl, Matthew (November 26, 2002)."Computer Pioneer Has Joined HP Labs".Los Angeles Times.RetrievedOctober 18,2022.
  15. ^Paczkowski, John (July 21, 2005)."HP converting storied garage into recycling center".Good Morning Silicon Valley.Media News Group. Archived fromthe originalon June 26, 2007.
  16. ^Raab, Andreas(July 6, 2001)."Events, Scripts & Multiple Processes".Archived fromthe originalon October 2, 2011.RetrievedJune 7,2009.
  17. ^"Tweak: Whitepapers".Archived fromthe originalon October 2, 2011.
  18. ^Kay, Alan;Ingalls, Dan;Ohshima, Yoshiki; Piumarta, Ian;Raab, Andreas."Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming – A Compact And Practical Model of Personal Computing As A Self-Exploratorium"(PDF).Archived fromthe original(PDF)on May 8, 2013.RetrievedMarch 23,2013.Proposal to NSF – Granted on August 31, 2006
  19. ^Kay, Alan (November 27, 2006)."How Simply and Understandably Could The" Personal Computing Experience "Be Programmed?".Archived fromthe originalon June 25, 2007.
  20. ^Vint Cerf;Bran Ferren;Greg Harrold;Quincy Jones;Gordon Bell;et al. (2010).Points of View — a tribute to Alan Kay(pdf).Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., Glendale, California. pp. 173,190–191,205–216, 218,228–229.ISBN978-0974313115.RetrievedNovember 5,2024.
  21. ^"UdK 01-Award".Archived fromthe originalon May 28, 2005.
  22. ^"2004 Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper Prize".National Academy of Engineering.National Academy of Sciences.
  23. ^"Hedersdoktorer 2008-1995, inklusive ämnesområden"(in Swedish).KTH.Archived fromthe originalon January 9, 2009.RetrievedJune 7,2009.
  24. ^"Tech forms dual-degree program with Chinese university"(PDF).The Whistle.Georgia Institute of Technology. December 19, 2005. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on July 1, 2016.
  25. ^"Columbia College Chicago Announces 2005 Commencement Ceremonies".Columbia College Chicago. May 10, 2005. Archived fromthe originalon March 20, 2012.
  26. ^"UW's convocation graduates 4,378 students, awards 10 honorary degrees".University of Waterloo.June 10, 2008.RetrievedJune 7,2009.
  27. ^"Alan Curtis Kay: Doctor Honoris Causa".Facultad de Informática, Universidad de Murcia.2010.
  28. ^"Alan Kay receives an honorary degree from the School of Informatics".School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.2017.
  29. ^"Alan Kay: 1999 Fellow Awards Recipient".Computer History Museum. Archived fromthe originalon October 3, 2012.
  30. ^"ACM Fellows".Association for Computing Machinery. 2008.
  31. ^"Alan Kay as HPI fellow appreciated"(in German). July 21, 2011. Archived fromthe originalon July 24, 2011.
  32. ^Kay, Alan (July 21, 2011)."Programming and Scaling".Germany, Potsdam, Hasso-Plattner Institute: HPI Potsdam.
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