Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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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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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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That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful.
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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAY