Alan Kay - Programming and Scaling

Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Colin McDonnell

Topic

software scaling and objects

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

4

HN mentions in dataset

8

Recommendation years in dataset

2016–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 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 …

• 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, …

• 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, …