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

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)

Fools! Don't they know that tears are a woman's most effective weapon? -- Catwoman (The Batman TV Series, episode 83)

Are you willing to wear your white belt? -- George Leonard, Mastery.

A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longuer anything to add, but when there is no longuer anything to take away. -- Antoine de St Exupery.

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

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. ~Anonymous

You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them. ~Michael Jordan

When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. ~Audre Lorde

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn