Explore Quotes by Alan Kay

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.

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

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

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

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.

Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to _x000D_make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. _x000D_As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If _x000D_we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for _x000D_personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing _x000D_a part of our lives?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

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