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.
ALAN KAYSchool is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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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People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
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So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
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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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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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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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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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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
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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 criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
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In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
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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.
ALAN KAY