Alan Kay Quotes

53 quotes in 688 categories

• Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
• Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
• Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
• The greatest single programming language ever designed
• Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
• I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
• Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
• Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
• In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
• The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
• 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.
• Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
• 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…
• We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
• 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…
• It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships,
• 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…
• The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
• Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
• 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…

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