A Conversation with Alan Kay

ACM Queue – A Conversation with Alan Kay – Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk—and much more.
He’s the guy who says great stuff like “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” as well as this chestnut that describes so perfectly the phenomenon so many of us experience in corporate life:

It’s not that people are completely stupid, but if there’s a big idea and you have deadlines and you have expedience and you have competitors, very likely what you’ll do is take a low-pass filter on that idea and implement one part of it and miss what has to be done next. This happens over and over again.

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