Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
ALAN KAYTechnology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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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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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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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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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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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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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
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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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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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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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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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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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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
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There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
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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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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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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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Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
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