The greatest single programming language ever designed
Interpretation
Alan Kay believes that the programming language he refers to is unparalleled in its design and capabilities.
In this quote, Alan Kay emphasizes the significance of programming languages in the evolution of technology, suggesting that there exists a programming language that stands out as the most innovative and effective in facilitating cognitive processes in computing. His statement advocates for the transformative potential of programming languages in shaping how we interact with technology and design solutions.
In practice
In a presentation on programming languages, one might cite this quote to highlight the advancements in language design.
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.
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. 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, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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 marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.
The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.
I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.
More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.
We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle.
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