The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures." Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress. On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened. -- Anton van Straaten (Na = Norman Adams, Qa = Christian Queinnec)
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
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -- Bill Gates
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. -- Donald Knuth
I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects. Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically *wrong*. That you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller projects elsewhere. -- Dan Nugent
Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think... -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan".
We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret. ~Earl Nightingale
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. ~Truman Capote
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. –Tony Robbins
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. ~Jim Ryun