Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
ALAN KAYI 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”.
More Alan Kay Quotes
-
-
If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
ALAN KAY -
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
ALAN KAY -
The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
ALAN KAY -
I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
ALAN KAY -
This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
ALAN KAY -
The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
ALAN KAY -
An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
ALAN KAY -
The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
ALAN KAY -
There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
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 KAY