If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
ALAN KAYThe real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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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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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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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
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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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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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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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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 computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
ALAN KAY