Alan Kay Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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.

Alan Kay

#2. 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.

Alan Kay

#3. Context is worth 80 IQ points.

Alan Kay

#4. If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Alan Kay

#5. All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#7. Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when and for what.

Alan Kay

#8. 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.

Alan Kay

#9. As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#11. I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#13. A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

Alan Kay

#14. 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.

Alan Kay

#15. We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

Alan Kay

#16. Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Alan Kay

#17. 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.

Alan Kay

#18. 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.

Alan Kay

#19. A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Alan Kay

#20. 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.

Alan Kay

#21. Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

Alan Kay

#22. 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.

Alan Kay

#23. If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

Alan Kay

#24. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Alan Kay

#25. An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

Alan Kay

#26. 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.

Alan Kay

#27. Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet

Alan Kay

#28. Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

Alan Kay

#29. I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#33. I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#36. 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.

Alan Kay

#37. 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.

Alan Kay

#38. 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

#39. Technology is anything invented after you were born.

Alan Kay

#40. Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Alan Kay

#41. Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#44. 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.

Alan Kay

#45. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

Alan Kay

#46. Change is easy, except for the changed part.

Alan Kay

#47. Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

Alan Kay

#48. 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.

Alan Kay

#49. [ 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.

Alan Kay

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

Alan Kay

#51. In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

Alan Kay

#52. 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.

Alan Kay

#53. 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, ...

Alan Kay