In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an ela…

The anthropomorphic analogy is misleading. A computer program is a formal system, not a collection of living beings. Forget that at your peril. http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/anthropomorphism-and-o…

Imagine for a moment that programmers were constantly baited with snake oil: paradigm shifts this way! Agile scrum productivity boost ahead! An IDE that will astound you! A framework that solves the i…

Another aspect of that same trait is the cult of iterative design. – EWD 1248…

GUI “variety”? Are you joking? The very reason there exists so much “variety” is that they all suck. – comment on HackerNews, on the “advantages of Linux”…

muchFrankly, raw seething bits is an abstraction on what is really provided: a bunch of circuitryIf we can abstract out the wires, we can abstract out the bits https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!top…

As software increasingly structures the contemporary world, curiously, it also withdraws, and becomes harder and harder for us to focus on as it is embedded, hidden, off-shored or merely forgotten abo…

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. – Tim Cargill…

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…