Alan Kay Quotes, Law Quotes, Track Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Law Quotes , Track Quotes

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

6 years ago

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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Order Quotes

A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.

6 years ago

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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

6 years ago

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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Curves Quotes , Desire Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Merit Quotes

I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Poor Quotes , Starters Quotes

The greatest single programming language ever designed

6 years ago

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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas Quotes

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Wise Quotes , Typical Quotes

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Worry Quotes , Investing Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Example Quotes

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Ideas Quotes

[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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , People Quotes , Pay Quotes

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Reality Quotes , Belief Quotes

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Believe Quotes , Should Have Quotes

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

6 years ago

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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

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When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because 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. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Hate Quotes , Law Quotes