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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

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
Hired
Poor
Good
Finisher
Finishers
Starter
Starters

More quotes by Alan Kay

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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
Alan Kay
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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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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
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
Alan Kay
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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
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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
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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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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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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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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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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 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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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
Alan Kay
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
Alan Kay
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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
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
Alan Kay