The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
ALAN KAYPerl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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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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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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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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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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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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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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There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
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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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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY