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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
Simplicity
Possible
Simple
Things
Programming
Complexes
Complex

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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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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.
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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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.
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If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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.
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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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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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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
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It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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.
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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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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay