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  • Alan Kay Quotes   73
  • Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in - the one that we think is reality.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Art Quotes , Jobs 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



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , People Quotes , Pay Quotes
  • 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?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Ideas 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Ocean Quotes , Technology Quotes
  • When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Iphone Quotes , Eight 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Design Quotes , Coins Quotes