Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAYScratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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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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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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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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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’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.
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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
ALAN KAY