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

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

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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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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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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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.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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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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We cannot predict the future, but we can 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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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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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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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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