Alan Kay Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

  Alan Kay

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• Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

  Alan Kay

  Believe, People, Voting

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• The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

  Alan Kay

  Design, Coins, Done

  ACM Queue, Volume 2, issue 9, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

  Alan Kay

  Beautiful, Merit, Purpose

  ACM Queue, Volume 2, issue 9, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

  Alan Kay

  Years, Apples, Different

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• Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

  Alan Kay

  Believe, Should Have, Class

  Interview with Stuart Feldman, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

  Alan Kay

  Statistics, Computer, Program

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• A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

  Alan Kay

  Views, Perspective, Point Of View

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• Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

  Alan Kay

  Media, Expression, Degrees

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• In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

  Alan Kay

  Nerd, Our Society, Slides

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• A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

  Alan Kay

  Coffee, Machines, Computer

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• The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

  Alan Kay

  Technology, Machines, Language

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• Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

  Alan Kay

  Real, Example, Needs

  "Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk - and much more". Interview with Stuart Feldman, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)

  Alan Kay

  Real, Order, Internet

  "A to Z of programming languages: Smalltalk-80". Interview with James Hutchinson, www.computerworld.com.au. July 8, 2010.

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• Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to
  make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
  As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If
  we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for
  personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing
  a part of our lives?

  Alan Kay

  Art, Reading, Writing

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• [Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

  Alan Kay

  People, Pay, Fabulous

  "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums". Rolling Stone, wheels.org. December 07, 1972.

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• If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

  Alan Kay

  Secret, World, Java

  "Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk - and much more". Interview with Stuart Feldman, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

  Alan Kay

  Real, Ideas, Apples

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• It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.

  Alan Kay

  Long, Term, Long Term

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• To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

  Alan Kay

  Magic, Literacy, Aim

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• Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

  Alan Kay

  Communication, Television, Warning

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• A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.

  Alan Kay

  Drinking, Wine, New Friends

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• The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

  Alan Kay

  Able, Destruction, Results

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