The greatest single programming language ever designed
Interpretation
Alan Kay believes that the programming language he refers to is unparalleled in its design and capabilities.
In this quote, Alan Kay emphasizes the significance of programming languages in the evolution of technology, suggesting that there exists a programming language that stands out as the most innovative and effective in facilitating cognitive processes in computing. His statement advocates for the transformative potential of programming languages in shaping how we interact with technology and design solutions.
In practice
In a presentation on programming languages, one might cite this quote to highlight the advancements in language design.
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.
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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.
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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 one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.
Yes, I was the one people credit with inventing the cell phone. Now, whenever anyone gets a dropped call, they blame me.
Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
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