L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus honoré. -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

Understanding why C++ is the way it is helps a programmer use it well. A deep understanding of a tool is essential for an expert craftsman. -- Bjarne Stroustrap

The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit. -- Anonymous

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

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. -- Rich Cook

In OO, it's the data that is the "important" thing: you define the class which contains member data, and only incidentally contains code for manipulating the object. In FP, it's the code that's important: you define a function which contains code for working with the data, and only incidentally define what the data is. -- almkgor, on reddit

Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning. ~Robert Kiyosaki

The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them. ~Denis Watiley

Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions. –Dalai Lama

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus