A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAYBy the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
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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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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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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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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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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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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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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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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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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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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
ALAN KAY






