Homogenisation - represent processes in machines that can interpret those representations#
In comment 11 on this blog post Alan Kay (also has other comments) writes about the "earliest ideas about the 'essence' of computing"
are all about being able to represent processes in machines that can interpret the representations. So this is a kind of “dynamic math and dynamic reading and writing and a dynamic parts of thinking“, and the study of this and making ideas and theories about this is a science. They decided to call it “computer science” as an aspiration for the future.
Link with programming languages#
Kay in a later comment mentions
This works well in a Prolog (or a Lisp or.a Logo) because they are all meta in that code is something (a) that can be looked at, and conversely (b) the stuff that can be put together to be looked at can also be interpreted as code (this is a very big idea — quite absent from the Framework’s purview even for high school — this is partly because in their limited view of things they were thinking of current HS AP in Java, and this kind of stuff is not at all straightforward in Java).
Mentioning Logo programming with 12/13 year olds with Paper/Soloman that could turn any English sentence into Pig Latin.
Byte Magazine Issue that contains the article Prolog/Robot that shows some of this.