Quote

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

Alan Kay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Learn
Language
Ever
Firsts
First
Thing
Disastrous
Programming

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
Alan Kay
Image
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
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.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
Image
In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
Alan Kay
Image
A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Alan Kay
Image
It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
Alan Kay
Image
Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
Alan Kay
Image
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
Image
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
Alan Kay
Image
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay