Alan Kay Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

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.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

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.

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.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

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.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

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.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

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.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.

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.

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

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.

Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.

It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

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.

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

Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.