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.

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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

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

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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

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

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The greatest single programming language ever designed

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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

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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.

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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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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

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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.

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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

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

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I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet

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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?

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

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