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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

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
Lead
Knowledge
Outlook
Silver
Weight
Gold

More quotes by Alan Kay

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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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To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
Alan Kay
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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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.
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.
Alan Kay
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
Alan Kay
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
Alan Kay
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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
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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.
Alan Kay
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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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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
Alan Kay
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
Alan Kay
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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
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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.
Alan Kay
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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
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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
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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.
Alan Kay