So still gangbusters for Chicago, though I haven't found a CouchDB to surf yet (stupid joke). PPUG was great last night, a really growing community, poor Produce Row for beers eh? All those paying customers. So in what ways am I pro Alan Kay? A very open minded guy in a lot of ways, worried about 'idiocracy' (I'll expound), and really a task master in terms of gym coach, like Richard Simmons on steroids. On the 'Idiocracy' front, he openly doubted whether 'people today' were smart enough to invent tcp/ip, like if we had to start all over, did we really have what it takes? On the open mindedness front, he was taking another look at JavaScript and really liking what he found, and that attitude communicated clearly enough to where I'd say my attending these Admirers of Javascript @ Cubespace are owing to his opening my eyes awhile back (Shuttleworth Foundation summit, me with the loud fan Toshiba). On the gym coach front, he'd openly diss with this "low pass filter" talk that drove people crazy, really challenging to hear. You could tell he admired Python though, a lot (he made no secret about it). So yeah, Alan the guy is impressive. I knew Arthur would be curious about my impressions, as he was very openly *not* an Alan Kay fan (talking about this very archive -- good reading). That's about the limit of my interactions. Here on edu-sig, I tried to communicate my discovery that he's actually a "slayer" versus Smalltalk, running a Buffy number against this early Frankenstein experiment, got OO out of the starting gate, but it's kind of like one of these horses at this point (from a deep DARPA past, like IDLE someday?): Anyway, thanks Alan for the heads up about Javascript. Probably my main disagreement with Alan's philosophy is I'm less attracted to neat, clean, recursive environments, prefer the more losely coupled heterogenous environment of competing paradigms. It's somewhat the difference between a great painter with a definite look and feel to explore, and an art curator, who enjoys artwork from multiple great painters (as I'm sure we all do). Like, I'm not that motivated to "solve" the problem of GNU/Linux being a world of bewildering complexity. Maybe Alan isn't either, in which case we're on the same side on this one. Note that I didn't say anything about Python, as I admire it too, just as Alan does. I cut my programming teeth on APL, found Python to be in that same groove for me, though not the same paradigm (APL was pre-OO in many ways, with the J language a more contemporary offering in the same lineage). I also thinking namespaces are a honking great idea. Honk honk! Back to PPUG, I've got the usual blog write-up. Basically, Python is doing well in the parsing, machine learning, and semi-structure data departments, though it's lagging vis-a-vis Tokyo Tyrant. Kirby