The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
ALAN KAYSo I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
More Alan Kay Quotes
-
-
It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
ALAN KAY -
Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
ALAN KAY -
The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
ALAN KAY -
Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
ALAN KAY -
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
ALAN KAY -
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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 -
As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAY -
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 -
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.
ALAN KAY -
This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
ALAN KAY -
I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
ALAN KAY -
The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
ALAN KAY -
Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
ALAN KAY -
School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAY -
When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.
ALAN KAY -
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
ALAN KAY -
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
ALAN KAY -
Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
ALAN KAY -
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
ALAN KAY -
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
ALAN KAY -
Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
ALAN KAY -
I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
ALAN KAY -
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
ALAN KAY