“Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.”

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

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”.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.

The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

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.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.

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.

Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.

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.

As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.

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.

In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.