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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

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
Lisp
Programming
Material
Materials
Building
Language

More quotes by 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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The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
Alan Kay
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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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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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
Alan Kay
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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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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.
Alan Kay
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
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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.
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.
Alan Kay