I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." -- Paul Graham
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
Do not accept anything because it comes from the mouth of a respected person. -- Buddha
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
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra
In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to find out what it could be true of. -- George Miller
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –Lao Tzu
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. ~Pablo Picasso
The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. ~Thomas Jefferson