I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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
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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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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 perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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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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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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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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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 real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY