Alan Kay interview

"One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

... In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.
So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

"that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over."

" I think the style languages [Lisp, APL, SmallTalk] appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them. Laziness actually pays off later on, because if you wind up spending a little extra time seeing that “oh, yes, this language is going to allow me to do this really, really nicely, and in a more general way than I could do it over here,” usually that comes back to help you when you’ve had a new idea a year down the road. The agglutinative languages, on the other hand, tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you’ve had that new idea."

"Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design."

"Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen?"

And many many great and strong ideas and concepts in this Alan Kay interview

Programming without variables

Follow Andrew Koenig's excellent blog with a series on programming whithout variables.

HTML, CSS, Javascript not real programming?

So, when I hear people say HTML and CSS (and even JavaScript) aren’t real programming, I think of Mainframe computers, and the Walkman, and The Encyclopedia Brittanica. All better. All gone.

Development x Packaged software

Yet another current myth, in Forrester's view, is that custom application development is dead, having fallen out of favor and supplanted by packaged products, according to Ried's report. "Definitely wrong," he wrote. "Enterprises spend about the same on custom-developed business applications as on packaged business software." Packaged applications are accounting for 25.8 percent of software spending while spending on custom software stands at 25.6 percent, according to the report.

"Custom development can be better as long as the business logic isn't subject to legal or tax regulations, such as financial accounting software."

Lucid

Mais uma ótima dica do amigo Orsoni: Lucid. 

" If you have a chance, try googling “esoteric programming languages”, “befunge”, “brainf**k”, “unlambda”, or “thue". 

Lucid proposes a completely different model. You look at the flow of data, not the flow of control. It can be considered a "dataflow" language.

Javascript?

Perhaps the next universal language? Looks possible. Some advantages: simple, used both on client and server side, quick learning.

Agile turned mainstream

And object oriented also did. That is good. But are the methodologies really used as they should? It seems that... no.