Alan Kay Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves 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.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in - the one that we think is reality.

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.

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.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

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.

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.

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.

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.