The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
ALAN KAYOf course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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But 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.
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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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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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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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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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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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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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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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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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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
ALAN KAY -
School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAY