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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Alan Kay

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Alan Kay
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: May 17
Computer Scientist
Jazz Guitarist
Jazz Musician
Programmer
University Teacher
Springfield
Massachusetts
Alan Curtis Kay
Alan C. Kay
Points
Perspective
Worth
Wisdom

More quotes by Alan Kay

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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 perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
Alan Kay
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.
Alan Kay
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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay
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It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
Alan Kay
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To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
Alan Kay
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
Alan Kay
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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
Alan Kay
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
Alan Kay