Quote

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

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
Done
Slowly
Programmers
Even
Heat
Designers
Something
Design
Extensions
Good
Terrible
Coins
Side
Flip
Sides
Carefully
Language
Programming
Tended
Best
Designer
Coin

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
Alan Kay
Image
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
Alan Kay
Image
Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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 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
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
Image
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
Image
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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
Image
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Alan Kay
Image
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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