Alan Kay Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Alan Kay
[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
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
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.

Alan Kay
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn't think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

Alan Kay
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!

Alan Kay
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.

Alan Kay
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the Aha. Art also has this element. 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.

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

Alan Kay
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
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
About the Lisp programming language:
...greatest single programming language ever designed.

Alan Kay
I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

Alan Kay
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
However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don't like any of them, and I don't think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users).

Alan Kay
About Internet:
Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order.

Alan Kay
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
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
Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

Alan Kay