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.
ALAN KAYBut once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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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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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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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Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors–is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.
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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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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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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.
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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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I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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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 real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY