Alan Kay Quotes

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

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.

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

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when and for what.

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

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

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

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

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

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

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.

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

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

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

Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet

It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships,

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

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

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

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

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

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

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

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

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

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