We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
ALAN KAYJava is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.
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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.
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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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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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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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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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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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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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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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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAY