Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
ALAN KAYScience requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
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If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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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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[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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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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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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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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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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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
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The 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.
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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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