A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAYThe soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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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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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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The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.
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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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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
ALAN KAY






