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Alan Kay Quotes
born 1940 United States
Alan Curtis Kay (born 17 May 1940) is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design.
United States Academics Computer scientists Designers Educators Also known as: Kay, Alan
Random Alan Kay quote
24 quotes
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay (1971)
Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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.
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.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
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.
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.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Object-oriented [programming] never made it outside of Xerox PARC; only the term did.
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.
Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”
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.
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.
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.
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