Alan Kay Quotes, Technology Quotes, Important Quotes

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

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Change is easy, except for the changed part.

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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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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Statistics Quotes , Computer Quotes

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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I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

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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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Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.

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

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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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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Funny Inspirational Quotes , Integrity Quotes

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

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

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

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

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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

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.

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Media Quotes , Expression Quotes