Alan Kay Quotes


Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.


Citations

Kay, Alan. "A Conversation with Alan Kay." ACM Queue, vol. 2, no. 9, Dec. 2004, p. 24.

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Alan Kay
Alan Kay
  • Born: May 17, 1940
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Scientist

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design.