Quote

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

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
Computer
Probably
Science
Ever
Many
Nano
Measured
Arrogance
Mets

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
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
Image
A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
Alan Kay
Image
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
Image
[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
Image
If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
Alan Kay
Image
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Alan Kay
Image
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
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
Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.
Alan Kay
Image
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Alan Kay
Image
In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
Alan Kay
Image
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
Alan Kay
Image
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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
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.
Alan Kay