quotes.vemod.net

As I’ve gained more experience with Perl it strikes me that it resembles Lisp in many ways, albeit Lisp as channeled by an awk script on acid.

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Only boring people are bored.

The faintest ink is better than the best memory.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

When I started, the computer classes were part of the applied- math department. By the time I graduated there actually was a computer- science department, but I stuck with math as my major. It felt like doing all the requirements for a computer-science major was like majoring in IBM. You had to learn their assembly language, you had to learn their 360 operating system, and so on. That didn’t seem like much fun.

At SGI, the kernel, of course, was where the real programmers with chest hair went, and there you couldn’t screw around. […] There’s a difference between raw pointers and this happy, fun JavaScript world. That kind of still separates the chest hair—gender-independent—programmers from those who don’t quite have it.

Yet there’s often a tension between small, elegant jewels and sprawling, practical balls of mud. A small, perfect jewel is easy to understand and it doesn’t have warts but then you have to build more stuff on top of it to do anything. So everybody reimplements the same things over and over and that leads to a different kind of bloat and ugliness.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part, raw in another.

If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Lisp är min älskling och alla fula gubbar som säger att hon borde sminka sig får med mig att göra.