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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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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
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Think
Java
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Distressing
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Computing
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More quotes by Alan Kay

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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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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.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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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.
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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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[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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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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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.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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