“Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.”

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.

In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

Much of the debugging has to be done by others.

Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

[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.

The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

When I first prepared this particular talk…

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.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.

To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.

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.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.