Quote

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.

Alan Kay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Used
Soft
Nerds
Hard
Ill
Violently
Sign
Integral
Whenever
Slide
Rules
Belt
Anybody
Slides
Ones
Belts
Calculators
Society
Nerd
Mentions

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
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
Image
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Alan Kay
Image
Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
Alan Kay
Image
An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
Image
Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
Alan Kay
Image
It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
Alan Kay
Image
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
Alan Kay
Image
Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
Alan Kay
Image
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
Image
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
Image
I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Alan Kay
Image
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.
Alan Kay
Image
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
Alan Kay
Image
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
Alan Kay
Image
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.
Alan Kay
Image
The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
Image
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Alan Kay