Alan Kay

1940– · American computer scientist (born 1940)

Topics: creativity, programming, software design, software engineering

• [ 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

• 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

• Object-oriented [programming] never made it outside of Xerox PARC; only the term did.

  — Alan Kay

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

  — 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

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

  — Alan Kay

• 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

• A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

  — 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

• 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

• 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

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

  — 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

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

  — Alan Kay

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

  — Alan Kay

• Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

  — Alan Kay