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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
Urine
Converting
Machine
Coffee
Scientist
Machines
Computer

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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. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to 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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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.
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The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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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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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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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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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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