Quote

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

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
Thing
Make
Think
Java
Thinking
Distressing
Like
Computing
Ones
Since
Ideas

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
Alan Kay
Image
Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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
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
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
The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
Alan Kay
Image
In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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
Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
Alan Kay
Image
If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
Alan Kay
Image
The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
Image
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
Image
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.
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
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
Image
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Alan Kay
Image
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
Alan Kay
Image
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
Image
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
Alan Kay