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.
ALAN KAYIn computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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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.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.
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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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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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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.
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The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.
ALAN KAY






