Alan Kay Quotes & Sayings

[ 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

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough. — Alan Kay

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it. — Alan Kay

When I first prepared this particular talk ... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything. — Alan Kay

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it. — Alan Kay

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. — Alan Kay

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

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

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied. — Alan Kay

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

Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet — 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

Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. — Alan Kay

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

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.' — Alan Kay

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. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice. — 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

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

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

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

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

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers. — Alan Kay

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

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world. — Alan Kay

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. — Alan Kay

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

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

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

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

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. — Alan Kay

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

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

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

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine. — Alan Kay

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language. — Alan Kay

The only way you can predict the future is to build it. — Alan Kay

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

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it. — Alan Kay

A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it. — Alan Kay

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight. — Alan Kay

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

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

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

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality. — Alan Kay

Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are. — Alan Kay

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. — Alan Kay

It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships, — Alan Kay

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

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

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing. — Alan Kay

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

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

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

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

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

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible. — Alan Kay

The greatest single programming language ever designed — Alan Kay

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

Context is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

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

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

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

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

Technology is anything invented after you were born. — Alan Kay

Change is easy, except for the changed part. — Alan Kay

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

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

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

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to
make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If
we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for
personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing
a part of our lives? — Alan Kay

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. — Alan Kay

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it. — Alan Kay

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