Ingalls and Deutsch were both part of Alan Kay's historic team at Xerox PARC, and much of the two interviews contains discussions of the work that went on at that time, its goals and techniques and observations. Ingalls recalls the focus on educational software:
It was envisioned as a language for kids -- children of all ages -- to use Alan's original phrase. I think one of the things that helped that whole project, and it was a long-term project, was that it wasn't like we were out to do the world's best programming environment. We were out to build educational software, so a lot of the charter was more in the space of simplicity and modeling the real world.
One of the implementation techniques that Ingalls particularly remembers, in stark contrast to the multi-hour batch cycles that were then common, was the sense of immediacy you got for making a change and almost instantly being able to observe the effect of the change:
For instance, our turnaround time for making changes in the system from the beginning was seconds, and subsecond fairly soon. It was just totally alive. Ant that's something which I, and a bunch of the other people, got a passion for. Let's build a system that's living like that. That's what Smalltalk became.
This goal of providing rapid feedback, interactive development, and immediate reflection of changes is indeed powerful. It lead to the development of modern IDE software (Eclipse was built by the OTI team, who wanted to expand on their work building environments for Smalltalk systems), as well to many software methodologies that favor iteration and short cycles, so that feedback and learning can occur. As the Agile Manifesto proposes:
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
My favorite part of the Ingalls interview was his description of the sort of person who makes the best programmer:
If you grow up in a family where when the cupboard door doesn't close right, somebody opens it up and looks at the hinge and sees that a screw is loose and therefore it's hanging this way vs. if they say, "Oh, the door doesn't work right; call somebody" -- there's a difference there. To me you don't need any involvement with computers to have that experience of what you see isn't right, what do you do? Inquire. Look. And then if you see the problem, how do you fix it?
In addition to this almost feverish curiosity, another major aspect of great programmers is their ability to think about problems abstractly. Deutsch recalls:
I've always been really comfortable in what I would call the symbolic world, the world of symbols. Symbols and their patterns have always just been the stuff I eat for lunch. And for a lot of people that's not the case.
...
The people who should be programming are the people who feel comfortable in the world of symbols. If you don't feel really pretty comfortable swimming around in that world, maybe programming isn't what you should be doing.
I thought it was very interesting to include Deutsch, as he's a notable person who was a Famous Computer Programmer for decades, then just one day got on his horse and rode out of town:
And I had this little epiphany that the reason that I was having trouble finding another software project to get excited about was not that I was having trouble finding a project. It was that I wasn't excited about software anymore. As crazy as it may seem now, a lot of my motivation for going into software in the first place was that I thought you could actually make the world a better place by doing it. I don't believe that anymore. Not really. Not in the same way.
Can software make the world a better place? I think it can, and after 30 years I'm not done trying. But I also believe you should follow your desires, and I'm pleased that Deutsch was able to recognize that his passion had moved elsewhere.
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