Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
ALAN KAYThe 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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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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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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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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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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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