Alan Kay Quotes

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

Algorithm

I did not grow up around computers, so technology was not a tool used every day in my household. I was drawn to computer science due to the creative nature of programming and the technology focus.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

I just write mechanical things.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.