https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY

In this video, Alan Kay does a little presentation about ideas that influenced him and then he and Joe Armstrong both have a casual conversation.

Alan Kay never had a big influence on me but in this video he is quite interesting. Here are some of the ideas that he talked about (I did not write down all, might be worth it to watch it a second time):

• Meta II showed how messages could be parsed on the fly. Figure 5 of the paper shows the Meta II compiler written in itself, it's just 23 LOC.

• Planner had the possibility of negotiation.
• TCP/IP
• Sketchpad
• Linda
• Erlang

Here are a few quotes from the talk by Alan Kay:

(the importance of community)

Scientists don't make science [...] you need to have a social system in order to debug your ideas.

We have academia consistently recycling bad ideas into the young.