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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
Language
Lisp
Programming
Material
Materials
Building

More quotes by 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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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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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.
Alan Kay
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The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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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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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
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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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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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
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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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 computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
Alan Kay
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
Alan Kay
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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay