The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
ALAN KAYThe Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
More Alan Kay Quotes
-
-
I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAY -
They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
ALAN KAY -
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
ALAN KAY -
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
ALAN KAY -
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
ALAN KAY -
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 -
Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
ALAN KAY -
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”.
ALAN KAY -
I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
ALAN KAY -
The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
ALAN KAY -
Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
ALAN KAY -
Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
ALAN KAY -
It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
ALAN KAY