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

More quotes by Alan Kay

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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
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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.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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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.
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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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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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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.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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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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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.
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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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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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
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It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
Alan Kay
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School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.
Alan Kay