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

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To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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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.
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It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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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.
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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.
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If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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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.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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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.
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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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.
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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.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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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.
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