The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
ALAN KAYTo get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
More Alan Kay Quotes
-
-
There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
ALAN KAY -
In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
ALAN KAY -
I’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.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
ALAN KAY -
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
ALAN KAY -
Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
ALAN KAY -
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAY -
The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAY -
By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
ALAN KAY -
This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
ALAN KAY -
Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
ALAN KAY -
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAY -
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.
ALAN KAY -
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
ALAN KAY






