For complex systems, the compiler and development environment need to be in the same language that its supporting. It's the only way to grow code. -- Alan Kay

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. -- Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Premature abstraction is an equally grevious sin as premature optimization. -- Keith Devens

It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. ~Albert Einstein

Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument. ~Anonymous