There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
ALAN KAYThere’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
ALAN KAY[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.
ALAN KAYScratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
ALAN KAYJava is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
ALAN KAYThere will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
ALAN KAYIn computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
ALAN KAYI hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
ALAN KAYThe Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
ALAN KAYArt 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.
ALAN KAYJava and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
ALAN KAYA new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
ALAN KAYComputer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
ALAN KAYBecause 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.
ALAN KAYThe 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 KAYI had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
ALAN KAYWhen I first prepared this particular talk…
ALAN KAY