Interview with Alan Kay: Dangers of CS design patterns

I really enjoyed this interview with Alan.  I thought it captured well the pace of a conversation with him — you cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and I always walk away with a long to-read list.

There are some wonderful ideas in here that fly in the face of common practice, like the danger of programming design patterns and education about them, the problems of the Web, and how we need more collaboration in American business.  That first one is particularly important for the audience for this blog– design patterns assumes that the way we program today is the way that we ought to program, and that’s not a safe assumption.

That’s when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My interest in education is unglamorous. I don’t have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.

via Interview with Alan Kay | Dr Dobb’s.