An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
ALAN KAYPeople are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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Because 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.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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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.
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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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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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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.
ALAN KAY