Getting back to failing early, I've learned it's important to completely fail. Get fired. Shoot the project, then burn its corpse. Melt the CVS repository and microwave the backup CDs. When things go wrong, I've often tried to play the hero from start to finish. Guess what? Some projects are doomed no matter what. Some need skills I don't possess. And some need a fresh face. -- Reginald Braithwaite

This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should no deserve the computer at all! It has allready taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremenduous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsec limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers. -- E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. -- Bill Gates

Normality is the route to nowhere. -- Ridderstrale & Nordstorm, Funky Business

Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don’t do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. -- M.A. Jackson

A tail call allows a function to return the result of another function without leaving an entry on the stack. Tail recursion is a specific case of tail calling. -- ASPN : Python Cookbook : Explicit Tail Call

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ~Thomas A. Edison

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. ~Bruce Lee

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso

Subscribe to The Morning Email.