Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
ALAN KAYThe biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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I 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.
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Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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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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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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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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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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Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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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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There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
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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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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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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.
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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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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
ALAN KAY