Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
ALAN KAYThere’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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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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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 had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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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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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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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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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
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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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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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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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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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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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