If I tell you I'm good, you would probably think I'm boasting. If I tell you I'm no good, you know I'm lying. -- Bruce Lee

This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should no deserve the computer at all! It has allready taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremenduous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsec limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers. -- E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

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

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -- Alan Kay

Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change the world? -- Steve Jobs, to John Sculley (former Pepsi executive)

Within a computer natural language is unnatural. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown

I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing. ~Martha Stewart