People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
ALAN KAYIf you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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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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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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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 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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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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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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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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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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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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.
ALAN KAY