When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
ALAN KAYMuch of the debugging has to be done by others.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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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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I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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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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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
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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.
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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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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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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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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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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 made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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