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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

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
Computer
Urine
Converting
Machine
Coffee
Scientist
Machines

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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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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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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.
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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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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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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.
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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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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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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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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 you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Alan Kay
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
Alan Kay