Alan Kay Quotes, Curves Quotes, Desire Quotes

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

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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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I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Mind Quotes , Programming Quotes

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

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

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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to 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 biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

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

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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

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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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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Training Quotes , Degrees 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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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

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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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Believe Quotes , Should Have Quotes

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

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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.

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

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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 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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Able Quotes , Destruction Quotes