“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

— Alan Kay

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no s…" by Alan Kay?

Alan Kay 25

computer scientist 1940

Related quotes

“The Egyptian Army is like that pyramid, it cannot be broken.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

- El-Sisi http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/10/07/egyptian-people-will-never-forget-who-stood-with-them-or-against-them-al-sisi/
2013

“For thousands of years people have been trying to force other people to think their way. Did they succeed? No. Will they succeed? No. Why? Because brute force is not an argument.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

“On the top of the wall lay a structure of burnt brick, about a foot and a half in height, under the tiles and projecting like a coping. …when the tiles on the roof are broken or thrown down by the wind so that rain-water can leak through, this burnt brick coating will prevent the crude brick from being damaged, and the cornice-like projection will throw off the drops beyond the vertical face, and thus the walls, though of crude brick structure, will be preserved intact.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VIII, Sec. 18

“The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can't help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: It probably could not fall down if it tried.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part I: It Seems There Were Two Egyptians, Cheops, or Khufu

“Simply, all what we did is that we avoided the country a big crisis and a battle between Egyptians. Beware, instead of Egyptians fighting each other, no, you can fight us, and we protect all. how many would fight us? but Egyptians fighting each other would be a big war, thousands may die, and maybe miliions.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during a military conference (28 April 2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC93fn9s3-c.
2013
Variant: Simply, all what we did is that we avoided the country a big crisis and a battle between Egyptians. Beware, instead of Egyptians fighting each other, no, you can fight us, and we protect all. how many would fight us? but Egyptians fighting each other would be a big war we couldn't have had the ability to deal with.

“The Ancient Egyptians were not fools, Carter. They built the pyramids. They created the first great nation state. Their civilization lasted thousands of years.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And now they’re gone.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“I really can't believe what a state the Pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they are just giant boulders balanced on top of each other, like a massive game of Jenga that has got out of hand.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Source: An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington

“I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, The Deep Blue Good-by (1964)
Source: The Deep Blue Good-By
Context: I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

“The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII, 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Source: The Shock of the New (1981), p. 393

“I believe the Great Pyramid was built to be the Bible in stone. The Egyptians did not build it.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alan Kay 25

Related quotes

Related topics