Alan Kay

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

The music is not in the piano.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Object-oriented programming is not the thing; it’s the *pointers* to the things.

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.

We’re in the Middle Ages of computing. We haven’t even invented the printing press yet.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the human spirit.

If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

The Dynabook hasn’t happened yet. The iPad is not it.

You need to have an idea that’s worth 10 person-years to get 10 people to work for a year.

The most important thing in a programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name.

We don’t have better ideas because we have the same ideas.

The computer is a medium of creative thought and expression.

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.

Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I’m sorry that I long ago coined the term “objects” for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea.

The big idea is messaging.

We should be building systems that are as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Any software system that expects to last must have a dynamic, malleable nature.

The goal is to have as few ideas as possible, but the right ones.