He's been here on HN as well in the past.

His answers on Quora represent a pretty extensive body of work. That's not true of his comments here (which are very appreciated, of course).

Quora's a better place, with a better UI, for that almost-blogging sort of thing.

I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media" that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS with James Gosling), here:

"Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

>Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”

Also here's a collection of HyperTIES discussions from Hacker News (including some discussion with Ben Shneiderman about why hypertext links are blue):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

Agreed about the Quora interface. I have a Jupyter notebook that scrapes all of Alan's answers and comments into a json database - he's answered a lot of questions!

He's been known to answer questions and leave comments right here on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay