Alan Kay
The Turing Award, computing's highest professional honor — wait, that characterization isn't in the facts. Let me write this cleanly.
Smalltalk, the object-oriented programming language most closely associated with Alan Kay's name, is the work that has drawn the most sustained attention to his career as a computer scientist and programmer.
Kay was born on May 17, 1940, in Springfield, a citizen of the United States who received his education at Brooklyn Technical High School, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Utah. Alongside his work in computing, he has maintained a life as a jazz guitarist and musician, pursuits that have run parallel to his career as a computer scientist, programmer, and university teacher.
The recognitions attached to his name are numerous and span several kinds of institutional distinction. He received the Turing Award, the ACM Software System Award, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Murcia and has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ACM Fellow, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.
That last fellowship — from the Computer History Museum — places Kay within a recognized record of the field's history alongside the other honors that have marked his career. He continues to work as a university teacher, carrying forward the dual identity of programmer and educator that has characterized his professional life since his years of study at the University of Utah.
Quotes by Alan Kay
Alan Kay's insights on:
In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research.
Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.
It's hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing - which I think is what we have - gives us '1984.'
In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'
Because people don't understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that 'Guitar Hero' is the same as a real guitar.
When I first got to Apple, which was in '84, the Mac was already out, and 'Newsweek' contacted me and asked me what I thought of the Mac. I said, 'Well, the Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.'
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.