Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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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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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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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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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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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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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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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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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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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves 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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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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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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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.
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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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