In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is. -- Albert Einstein

Simplicity and pragmatism beat complexity and theory any day. -- Dennis (blog comment)

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

An expert is, according to my working definition "someone who doesn't need to look up answers to easy questions". -- Eric Lippert.

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people. -- Matz, LL2

You can have premature generalization as well as premature optimization. -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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

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

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. ~Truman Capote

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.~ Anatole France