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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
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More quotes by Alan Kay
In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
Alan Kay
[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.
Alan Kay
It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
Alan Kay
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
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Alan Kay
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
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
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
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
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
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
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
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
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Alan Kay
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
Alan Kay
I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
Alan Kay
It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
Alan Kay
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