Blasphemy. Alan Kay first said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" in 1971, before DHH was born.
If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well, that's bullshit.
If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well, that's bullshit.
You can safely assume he didn't.
I could even be wrong about it being a Kay quote, but I think so.
thanks HN, I figure if someone here doesn't know, maybe someone can call Kay and ask him ;)
"We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn't work."
from http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work."
If it's legitimate then it seems DHH is guilty as charged.
David Heinemeier Hansson: [in response to a question]
I try not to predict the future. I’m not a big believer in fortune telling. The best way to predict the future is to implement it.
Since when was quoting a classic aphorism a source of "guilt"? Am I supposed to include a footnote every time I use phrases like premature optimization, or considered harmful, or half-implemented buggy version of half of Common Lisp in casual conversation? Or does the do-not-quote-others rule only apply to DHH, who seems to attract character assassins as honey draws flies?
But if you wonder why DHH seems to attract character assassins, look no further than how he signed off from his Christmas Eve post http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-an...
"So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!"
That's a great way to tick off a billion or so people.
I guess I'm going to have to email Mr. Kay myself if I want to find this so hard to find quote. Noone on HN seems to know it. I do recall that when I read it at least 10 years ago, I read it "offline". Maybe the goog doesn't know this one? ;)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/quotes
I thought that even one-celled animals had seen Die Hard by now. But perhaps it's more of a generational thing than I had realized.
At least see the first one.
Since he's a moderately influential person participating in an interview where he knows his statements will be reprinted as his own words.
Is this common? If so, then perhaps I'm wrong for assigning blame to DHH. Can you point me to some other interviews where the interviewee uses a well-known quote that's not his without some form of attribution?
Usually when people quote Greenspun's 10th Rule they cite it as such.
You quote Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and other Grecoroman philosophers all the time, and you don't even know it. Not to mention Shakespeare, Aesop, and even modern day people. (Inspiration vs perspiration, for example.) Many "sayings" have origins with a specific person who said or wrote it, in a documented fashion, even though they've slipped into common culture. Even new words, like "OK" and "bloodstained."
If people really want to bitch about David that much, there are much, much better grounds they can find than this.
who cares? Life is short. Choose your battles wisely.