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.
ALAN KAYThe 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.
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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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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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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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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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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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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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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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.
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If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
ALAN KAY