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.
ALAN KAYI’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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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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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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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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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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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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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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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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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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
ALAN KAY