Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. -- Frederick P. Brooks, No Sliver Bullet.

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity. -- W.A. Wulf

I guess, when you're drunk, every woman looks beautiful and every language looks (like) a Lisp :) -- Lament, #[email protected]

You have to write for your audience. I would never write (1..5).map &'*2' in Java when I could write ListFactoryFactory.getListFactoryFromResource( new ResourceName('com.javax.magnitudes.integers'). setLowerBound(1).setUpperBound(5).setStep(1).applyFunctor( new Functor () { public void eval (x) { return x * 2; } })) I'm simplifying, of course, I've left out the security and logging wrappers. -- Reginald Braithwait

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

A no uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a yes merely uttered to please or what is worse, to avoid trouble. -- Mahatma Gandhi

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb

It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar