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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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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
Failing
Problems
Challenges
Probably
Working
Problem
Time
Sufficiently
Challenging

More quotes by Alan Kay

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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
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Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.
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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.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
Alan Kay
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Alan Kay
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
Alan Kay
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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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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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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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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
Alan Kay
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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
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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