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 KAYIt’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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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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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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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.
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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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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Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors–is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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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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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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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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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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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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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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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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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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 hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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[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.
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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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