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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
Time
Sufficiently
Challenging
Failing
Problems
Challenges
Probably
Working
Problem

More quotes by 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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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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Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
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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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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I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Alan Kay
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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay
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It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Alan Kay
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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
Alan Kay
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Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.
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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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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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
Alan Kay
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It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
Alan Kay