Explore Quotes by Alan Kay

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

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

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

The greatest single programming language ever designed

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

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

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.

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

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

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

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.

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.

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

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.

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