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.
ALAN KAYTo get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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When I first prepared this particular talk…
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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.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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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 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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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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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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