Alan Kay
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.Collection: Secret
[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.Collection: People
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.Collection: Communication
A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.Collection: Drinking
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.Collection: Coffee
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.Collection: Real
Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.Collection: Technology
To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.Collection: Magic
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.Collection: Able
It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Real
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.Collection: Reality
I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.Collection: Training
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Iphone
Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.Collection: Communication
Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.Collection: Wise
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.Collection: Education
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Teacher
The greatest single programming language ever designedCollection: Language
The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.Collection: Freedom
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.Collection: Poor
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.Collection: Real
If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.Collection: Satisfied
The only way you can predict the future is to build it.Collection: Way
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.Collection: Language
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.Collection: Stanford University
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.Collection: Beautiful
In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.Collection: Statistics
Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.Collection: Technology
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.Collection: Romance