Alan Kay Quotes

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.