Alan Kay

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) 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 design. He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid-2005, he was a senior fellow at HP Labs, a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer, and an amateur classical pipe organist.

Programming Talks by Alan Kay

Rethinking Computer Science Education

Rethinking Computer Science EducationAlan Kay talks about alternative approaches to teach Computer Science in schools. ...

Power of Simplicity

Alan Kay
an hour
Power of SimplicityOne of my all time favorite talks of Alan Kay's, given in 2015. Not my own video, though it hasn't been on YouTube before. Original location here: http://global.sap.com/campaign/na/usa/CRM-XU15-INT-STILP/index.html ...

Rethinking Design, Risk, and Software

Rethinking Design, Risk, and SoftwareOur increasingly complex needs have led us to build increasing complex software. We’ve done this in an incremental fashion, building code on top of code. We write understandable snippets of code built on programming languages we know well and then bundle them into program structures to perform complex tasks. This ...

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create It. But Is It Already Too Late?

Alan Kay
an hour
    The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create It. But Is It Already Too Late?Computer science pioneer Alan Curtis Kay, Ph.D., will deliver this year’s Lindberg-King Lecture in the Lister Hill Auditorium. His talk is titled, "The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create It. But Is It Already Too Late?" A child prodigy, Dr. Kay was an original member of the ...

    The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental

    The Future Doesn't Have to Be IncrementalWhen thinking about the future, you can't do better than Alan Kay. In The Future Doesn't Have To Be Incremental, Kay describes how Xerox PARC was able to develop so many new technologies in such a short time, including the personal computer, bitmap displays, GUI, desktop publishing, word processing, laser ...

    Doing with Images Makes Symbols

    Alan Kay
    an hour
    Doing with Images Makes SymbolsHow humans learn and how to build user interfaces that support it. “The parts of the body you want to have learn don’t understand English.” ...

    The computer revolution hasnt happened yet

    Alan Kay
    an hour
    The computer revolution hasnt happened yetAlan Kay's seminal 1997 OOPSLA keynote. Originally hosted on Google Video, copies of it are now only available from the squeak.org website as far as I can find. Putting it on youtube is my attempt to preserve a really important talk and computer science and computing in general. ...