Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors–is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.
ALAN KAYPeople who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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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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When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.
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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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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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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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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.
ALAN KAY