The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAYThe hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAYIn a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
ALAN KAYAs in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAYOf course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
ALAN KAYMost 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.
ALAN KAYI 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.
ALAN KAYThere will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
ALAN KAYI fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAYI think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
ALAN KAYSchool is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAYThey don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
ALAN KAYThe biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
ALAN KAYI hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
ALAN KAYA computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAYMost creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAYThe protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
ALAN KAY