The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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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The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
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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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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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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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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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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 I first prepared this particular talk…
ALAN KAY






