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 KAYAny medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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 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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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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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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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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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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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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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
ALAN KAY






