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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.

-Alan Kay

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The Flip Side Of

Alan Kay

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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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Technology Is Anything That Wasn't Around When You Were Born.

The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Invent It.

Bad User On Device Is A Medium That Can Dynamically Simulate The Details Of Any Other Medium, Including Media That Cannot Exist Physically. It Is Not A Tool, Although It Can Act Like Many Tools. It Is The First Metamedium, And As Such It Has Degrees Of Freedom For Representation And Expression Never Before Encountered And As Yet Barely Investigated.

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 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.

It's All About Long-term, Sustaining Relationships.

The Idea That Hardware On Networks Should Just Be Caches For Movable Process Descriptions And The Processes Themselves Goes Back Quite A Ways. There's A Real Sense In Which Ms And Apple Never Understood Networking Or Operating Systems (or What Objects Really Are), And When They Decided To Beef Up Their Oss, They Went To (different) Very Old Bad Mainframe Models Of Os Design To Try To Adapt To Personal Computers.

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.

Don't Worry About What Anybody Else Is Going To Do. The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Invent It.

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.

To Get The Medium's Magic To Work For One's Aims Rather Than Against Them Is To Attain Literacy.

We Cannot Predict The Future, But We Can Invent It.

Any Medium Powerful Enough To Extend Man's Reach Is Powerful Enough To Topple His World.

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.

Funny Inspirational

An Important Technology First Creates A Problem And Then Solves 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.

The Tree Of Research Must Be Fed From Time To Time With The Blood Of Bean-counters, For It Is Its Natural Manure.

The Real Romance Is Out Ahead And Yet To Come. The Computer Revolution Hasn't Started Yet.

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.

In Computers, Every 'new Explosion' Was Set Off By A Software Product That Allowed Users To Program Differently.

When I First Prepared This Particular Talk... I Realized That My Usual Approach Is Usually Critical. That Is, A Lot Of The Things That I Do, That Most People Do, Are Because They Hate Something Somebody Else Has Done, Or They Hate That Something Hasn't Been Done. And I Realized That Informed Criticism Has Completely Been Done In By The Web. Because The Web Has Produced So Much Uninformed Criticism. It's Kind Of A Gresham's Law-bad Money Drives The Good Money Out Of Circulation. Bad Criticism Drives Good Criticism Out Of Circulation. You Just Can't Criticize Anything.

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.

By The Time I Got To School, I Had Already Read A Couple Hundred Books. I Knew In The First Grade That They Were Lying To Me Because I Had Already Been Exposed To Other Points Of View. 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, So It Was A Battle. Of Course I Would Pipe Up With My Five-year-old Voice.

I Made Up The Term "object-oriented," And I Can Tell You I Did Not Have C++ In Mind.

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.

Humans Are Communications Junkies. We Just Can't Get Enough.

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A New Friend Is New Wine, When It Grows Old, You Will Enjoy Drinking It.

A Computer Scientist Is A Machine For Converting Coffee Into Urine.

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.

The Biggest Problem We Have As Human Beings Is That We Confuse Our Beliefs With Reality.

The Only Way You Can Predict The Future Is To Build It.

People Who Are Really Serious About Software Should Make Their Own Hardware.

Every Technology Really Needs To Be Shipped With A Special Manual - Not How To Use It But Why, When, And For What.

As Far As Apple Goes, It Was A Different Company Every Few Years From The Time I Joined In 1984.

If You're Not Failing 90% Of The Time, Then You're Probably Not Working On Sufficiently Challenging Problems.

Change Is Easy, Except For The Changed Part.

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.

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.

Lisp Isn't A Language, It's A Building Material.

I Fear - As Far As I Can Tell - That Most Undergraduate Degrees In Computer Science These Days Are Basically Java Vocational Training. I've Heard Complaints From Even Mighty Stanford University With Its Illustrious Faculty That Basically The Undergraduate Computer Science Program Is Little More Than Java Certification.

Stanford University

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 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.

Simple Things Should Be Simple And Complex Things Should Be Possible.

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.

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.

I Fear - As Far As I Can Tell - That Most Undergraduate Degrees In Computer Science These Days Are Basically Java Vocational Training.

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Knowledge Is Silver. Outlook Is Gold. Iq Is A Lead Weight.

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Possibly The Only Real Object-oriented System In Working Order. (about Internet)

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I Hired Finishers Because I'm A Good Starter And A Poor Finisher.

The Most Disastrous Thing That You Can Ever Learn Is Your First Programming Language.

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Any Company Large Enough To Have A Research Lab Is Too Large To Listen To It.

Basic Would Never Have Surfaced Because There Was Always A Language Better Than Basic For That Purpose. That Language Was Joss, Which Predated Basic And Was Beautiful. But Basic Happened To Be On A Ge Timesharing System That Was Done By Dartmouth, And When Ge Decided To Franchise That, It Started Spreading Basic Around Just Because It Was There, Not Because It Had Any Intrinsic Merits Whatsoever.

If You're Utopian, You're Never Satisfied.

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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.

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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