People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
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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I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
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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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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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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 greatest single programming language ever designed
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
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Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.
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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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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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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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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”.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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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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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors–is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
ALAN KAY