Alan Kay Short Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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