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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.

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
Law
Known
Violate
Future
Laid
Universe
Extent
Work
Decide
Something
Track
Way
Laws
Make
Probably

More quotes by Alan Kay

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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Alan Kay
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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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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
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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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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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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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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
Alan Kay
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
Alan Kay
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
Alan Kay
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
Alan Kay
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
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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. 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
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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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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
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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
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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