The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAYI don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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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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There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
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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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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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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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It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can 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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
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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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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAY