In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
ALAN KAYThe hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Most 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.
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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The best way to predict the future is to invent 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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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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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.
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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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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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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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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
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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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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
ALAN KAY