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 KAYSo 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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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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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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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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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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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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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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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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.
ALAN KAY