Alan Kay

"Technology is anything that wasnt around when you were born."

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

"Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. Theres 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 were in — the one that we think is reality."

"I dont know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."

"... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)"

"Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)"

"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."

"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. Its just secret to this pop culture."

"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."

"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 didnt 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."

"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."

"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."