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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

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
Things
Programming
Complexes
Complex
Simplicity
Possible
Simple

More quotes by 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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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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.
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.
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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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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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. 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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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
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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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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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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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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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When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
Alan Kay
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay