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 KAYSun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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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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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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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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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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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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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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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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The 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.
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They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAY