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.
ALAN KAYIf the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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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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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
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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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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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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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I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
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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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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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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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