There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
ALAN KAYComputer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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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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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
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Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
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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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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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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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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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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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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I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
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The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
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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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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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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
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