Alan Kay

"what is the carrying capacity for ideas of the computer?... the computer is a metamedium — it can simulate any existing media also be the basis of media that can't exist without the computer. I was particularly drawn to the idea of better childhood education with the new possibilities to represent powerful ideas that the computer brought would be a strong way to help children 'grow up thinking much better than most adults do today'."

—Alan Kay

“The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”

—Alan Kay

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

—Alan Kay

“Technology is anything invented after you were born.”

—Alan Kay

“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”

—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

“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

“In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.”

—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

"Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it."

—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

"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

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

—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

"Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight."

—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

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

—Alan Kay