Quote

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

Alan Kay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Working
Problem
Time
Sufficiently
Challenging
Failing
Problems
Challenges
Probably

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
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
Image
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
Image
In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
Alan Kay
Image
Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
Alan Kay
Image
If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
Alan Kay
Image
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
Image
An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Alan Kay
Image
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
Image
I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
Alan Kay