Alan Kay Quotes
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. 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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
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School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art 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.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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. 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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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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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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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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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. 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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I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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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.
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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
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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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By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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