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

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
Predict
Invent
Easier
Future
Inspirational

More quotes by Alan Kay

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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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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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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.
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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
Alan Kay
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
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Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.
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.
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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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