our assessment method is so empirical that it would be equivalent to building a copy of the failed bridge, and observe bolt by bolt – with intuition (and stack dumps) guiding which bolts to observe fi…

Scheme is a beautiful programming language, but every Scheme program is ugly. – Larry Wall…

the result of striving for ultimate simplicity is intolerable complexitytoo-long proofstoo-long definitions…

So the tension around types comes from the fact that if you want to program in a style that turns effects into explicit things that get passed around, sophisticated higher-order functions are necessar…

If I sound elitist, it’s only because the time and difficulty required for wrapping a complex topic into a coherent narrative is often underestimated by those who have never done it. A book is not 150…

Processes componentize the heap. Modules componentize the code. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058789.html…

When I worked with companies that have a holy mess of code, I felt like there wasn’t enough time in the day to refactor everything. When things broke when I refactored them I got yelled at. It felt li…

I think one of the main consequences of the inventions of personal computing and the world wide Internet is that everyone gets to be a potential participant, and this means that we now have the entire…

Actum ne agas…

Not 128M. Not 128K. 128 bytesYou can’t even fit a whole Twitter Tweet in there Source: wordsofadvice4young.blogspot.com…

Lisp is like a religion. It was created by superstitious primitives long before I was born, asks people to have faith that all will be revealed in time, and is still waiting for the prophet that will…

… the curse of macros: You cannot in general expect to understand fully what some code would compile to without being the compiler.  In inferior languages, the code you write is probably the code the…