Quotes


“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.” – Paul Rand

"Let the man know that he can" – Alfredo Barragán (After crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a raft of trunks)

"Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet" – Bruce Schneier

"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981.

"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education  there is." – Isaac Asimov

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." – Alan Kay

"People who are really serious about software should make their  own hardware" – Alan Kay

"The secret of success? Good decisions.
How do you make good decisions?  Experience.
How do you get experience? Bad decisions. " – Anon

"We aim to make simple things simple and complex things possible" – Alan Kay

"Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts." – Gregory Benford

"A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your  mind." – Paul Graham

"Internet, good; World Wide Web, bad. The Web was put together by people with more energy than sophistication." – Alan Kay

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?" – Anon

"With Smalltalk as your boat, no amount of C is uncrossable!" – SqueakNOS team

"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." – Alan Kay

"Smalltalk := nil. The best way to restore an image." – Anon

"Smalltalk is dangerous. It is a drug. My advice to you would be don't try it; it  could ruin your life."" – Andy Bower co-founder of Dolphin Smalltalk

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." – Fred Brooks

"Life would be so much easier if we could just see the source code." – Anon

"Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but  rather when there is nothing more to take away" – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" – Albert Einstein

"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt  axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead." – Edsger W.  Dijkstra

"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the  poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians." – Edsger W.  Dijkstra

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." – Albert Einstein

"A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God." – Alan J. Perlis

"Actually, I'm trying to make Ruby natural, not simple." – Yukihiro Matz Matsumoto

"Javascript is the duct tape of the Internet." – Charlie Campbell

"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." – Robert Sewell

"Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." – Alan Kay

"Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program [Java] that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong." – Bill Gates

"Smalltalk is a vision of the computer as a medium of self expression. ... A humanistic vision of the computer as something everyone could use and benefit from. If you are going to have a medium for self expression, programability is key because unless you can actually make the system behave as you want you are a slave to what's on the machine. So it's really vital, and so language comes to the for because it's through language that you express yourself to the machine." – Elliot Miranda

"There are only two things wrong with C++, The initial concept and the implementation" – Bertrand Meyer

"I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind" – Alan Kay, OOPSLA '97

"In essence, Smalltalk is a programming language focused on human beings rather than the computer" – Alan Knight

"Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible" – Alan Kay