Daniel Ingalls is one of the most important participants of this WikiSym edition. He’s participating as an invited speaker and we interviewed him just in time to get you some information on his career.

1. When has you career in Software Development started?
Around 1970.

2. Considering what you invented, do you think that you have revolutioned computer programming and architecture?
I do feel that I’ve contributed to some good progress, but I’ve never felt it was a “me” thing.  I’ve had a lot of fun, drawn energy from the people and things around me, and I hope I’ve given back some of the same.

3. Is there anything you would still like to do, in that area, that you haven’t done yet?
I still feel that things can be simpler.  I hope that, with the help of increasingly high-level language tools, we may be gradually able to leave the language wars behind us, and move into an era of focus on the more basic semantic models, relationships, and architectures.

4. What do you foresee to happen in a near future, considering the current trends of informatics?
I believe that this trend we call “Web 2.0” will continue, as an exciting recreation of the personal computer revolution, but now in the context of dynamic languages and the web.

5. When did you start getting involved with wikis?
Around the time when Squeak came out with one of the first really simple, small Wiki kernels.  But this was not my work, except for the system in which it was built.

6. What do you think that could be improved on platforms like wikis?
I think of everything on the web as being active, so I look to the future of Wikis as being an editable world of active objects.

7. What are your expectations towards this edition of WikiSym? Have you participated on events like this before?
This is my first visit to WikiSym, and I have no expectations, except to share some of the excitement of new possibilities.

8. If there’s anything else that you would like to say, please:
Thank you so much.