I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
ALAN KAYSo 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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
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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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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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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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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.
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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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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
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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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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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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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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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.
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I 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”.
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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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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.
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
ALAN KAY