I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
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
-
-
There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
ALAN KAY -
As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAY -
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
ALAN KAY -
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
ALAN KAY -
Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
ALAN KAY -
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”.
ALAN KAY -
Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
ALAN KAY -
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.
ALAN KAY -
Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
ALAN KAY -
It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
ALAN KAY -
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAY -
To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAY -
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
ALAN KAY