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.
ALAN KAYI fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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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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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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Much of the debugging has to be done by others.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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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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It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
ALAN KAY






