A CS professor once explained recursion as follows: A child couldn't sleep, so her mother told her a story about a little frog, who couldn't sleep, so the frog's mother told her a story about a little bear, who couldn't sleep, so the bear's mother told her a story about a little weasel... who fell asleep. ...and the little bear fell asleep; ...and the little frog fell asleep; ...and the child fell asleep. -- everything2.com

640K ought to be enough for anybody. -- Bill Gates, 1981

Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them. -- Malcolm Gladwell, Who says big ideas are rare?

C and Lisp stand at opposite ends of the spectrum; they're each great at what the other one sucks at. -- Steve Yegge, Tour de Babel.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects. Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically *wrong*. That you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller projects elsewhere. -- Dan Nugent

To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can’t just accept the ones you like. ~Mike Gafka

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller

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