Alan Kay Quotes

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

Our ultimate goal is extensible programming (EP). By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

We try to continually push ourselves to do more and more, not just on the hardware side but also in terms of developers' tools so they can take advantage of the hardware that's there, in the best way.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

For every job you require a kind of mindset. To be a teacher one should be knowledgeable. To be a software engineer you should know computer data system analysis, computer language etc. So, my mindset is not aligned with politics.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

A real Christian in an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest, and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passes knowledge.

Network. Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

Climate change is real. In order to alter this reality, we need all hands on deck.

I go to the real world, not the Internet.

An organisation can only carry out its mandate if there is discipline, and where there is no discipline there can be no real progress

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.