Alan Kay Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.

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”.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.

The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

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.