Stasis

Alan Kay paraphrased by Phil Windley...

The future five years out is easy to predict because all of the forces acting on computer science are trying to keep it the same as it is now...

Architecture demands arches...

[People's] stories are inconsistent with what they know, yet they persist in believing them, even though they have the knowledge that contradicts their theory.

When people react instantly, they’re not thinking, they’re doing a table lookup...

To do creative work in computing, you must get past what you think is normal. Write down the 20 things you think are true of computing and try to demolish them...

Most people who graduate with CS degrees don’t understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. Alan’s breakthrough in object oriented programming, wasn’t objects, it was the realizing the the Lisp metasystem was what we needed...

Barton taught me “The basic principle of recursive design is making the parts as powerful as the whole.” These ideas led me to an insight on November 11, 1966: the timesharing people got it right with processes, but it was too big.