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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

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
Stuff
Else
Anything
Everything
Invented
Technology
Born

More quotes by Alan Kay

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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
Alan Kay
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
Alan Kay
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[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
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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.
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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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
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I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Alan Kay
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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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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
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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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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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