Alan Kay Quotes, Nerd Quotes, Our Society Quotes

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.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Nerd Quotes , Our Society Quotes

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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Secret Quotes , World Quotes

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Inspirational Quotes

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Education Quotes , Teacher Quotes

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes

[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.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , People Quotes , Pay Quotes

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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Believe Quotes , People Quotes

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , People Quotes , Trying Quotes

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Freedom Quotes , Science Quotes

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Technology Quotes , Special Quotes

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Easy Quotes

When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Hate Quotes , Law Quotes

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

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Example Quotes

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

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Technology Quotes , Machines Quotes

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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Design Quotes , Coins Quotes

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Law Quotes , Track Quotes

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

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Long Quotes , Term Quotes

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

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

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Magic Quotes , Literacy Quotes

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas Quotes