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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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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
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[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
Alan Kay
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Alan Kay
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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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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.
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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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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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I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
Alan Kay
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay