If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
ALAN KAYAny company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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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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I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
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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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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
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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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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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.
ALAN KAY