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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

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
Done
Thousands
Pyramids
Much
Slave
Programmers
Like
Integrity
Brutes
Piled
Computer
Bricks
Pyramid
Technology
Slaves
Structural
Millions
Programming
Brute
Force
Software
Hardware
Today
Code
Egyptian

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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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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.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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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