School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAYMost software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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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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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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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.
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There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
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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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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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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.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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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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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
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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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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
ALAN KAY