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 KAYAnd 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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
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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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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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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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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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As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
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If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
ALAN KAY