Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
ALAN KAYBy the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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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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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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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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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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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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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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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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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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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 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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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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I 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.
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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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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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.
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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?
ALAN KAY