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Alan Kay - Programming and Scaling

Colin McDonnell · 36.2K views · 2015-06-17 · 56:39

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Overview

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

On Hacker News

HN fans call it one of Kay's best talks and recommend it for rethinking why programming paradigms have barely changed.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2016–2026

Topics

Software architecture & designTech pioneers & interviewsProgramming language design
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alan kayoopsmalltalkcode sizesystems thinking

What people said

neuralkoi · 2026-07 · Strong recommendation

Check out Alan Kay's perspective on this [0]. This talk is excellent and will cue you in on how to go about thinking about the fact that the way we program and view and understand computers, with the exception of recent advances in neural networks/LLMs, has followed largely unchanged for the past 65 or so years. [0] [VIDEO]

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espeed · 2018-10 · Strong recommendation

This is one of my favorite Alan Kay talks of all time (I think this is the right version, but at the time it wasn't on YouTube)... Programming and Scaling - Alan Kay [VIDEO] There's also one where he discusses anthropology and the human universals, but the title of that talk has escaped me for years. Anyone remember what that one's called?

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unimpressive · 2016-10 · Strong recommendation

These aren't necessarily my absolute favorite talks, but they're great mind-altering talks a little off the beaten path so I'd like to highlight them: "Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch" by Travis Goodspeed - [LINK] Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool theoretical hard disk defense stuff, incredibly insightful and introduces a hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot. "Programming and Scaling" by Alan Kay - [VIDEO] Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosophy of computer science which analogizes systems to biological systems, which are the systems with the largest proven scaling on the planet. "The Mother Of All Demos" by Douglas Engelbart - [LINK] This talk is so prescient you won't believe your eyes. Given in 1968, Douglas demonstrates just about every major computing concept in use today on a modern machine, along with some ones that are still experimental or unevenly distributed such as smooth remote desktop and collaborative editing.

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Sources

Video by Colin McDonnell, played through YouTube.

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