To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAYTo get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAYSchool is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAYAn important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
ALAN KAYAnd I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
ALAN KAYWhen was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
ALAN KAYMost 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.
ALAN KAYBecause 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.
ALAN KAYThe best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAYThe most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
ALAN KAYKnowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
ALAN KAYA computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAYBut 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.
ALAN KAYI knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
ALAN KAYPeople who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
ALAN KAYThe tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
ALAN KAYThe hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAY