Training research shows that if you get speed now you can get quality later. But if you don't get speed you will never get quality in the long run. -- Philip Greenspun
Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file, socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this would necessarily involve a dumbing down. -- VladimirSlepnev
Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible. -- Alan Kay
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
And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky
It's like a condom; I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. -- some chick in Alien vs. Predator, when asked why she always carries a gun
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan
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
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life — think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. ~Swami Vivekananda
If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. –Abigail Van Buren