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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.

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
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Violently
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Integral
Whenever
Slide
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Belt
Anybody
Slides
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Calculators
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More quotes by Alan Kay

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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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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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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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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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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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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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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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Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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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.
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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.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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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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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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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