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Software has become a universal language, the interface to our imagination and the world. What electricity and the combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st centu…
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Lisp and Haskell to my mind form the two leading languages of two fundamentally contradictory families. Lisp works by empowering programmers and building on that power, and Haskell works by limiting t…
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[Pop culture] has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their…
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The tech business is proud of its workaholism, but it really shouldn’t be. It’s a sign of immaturity and poor management, not drive. http://www.marco.org/2014/12/14/from-open-unlimited-to-minimum-vac…
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Guy Steele: Should programming languages be designed for theoreticians to facilitate reasoning or for practitioners for getting systems built? Should there be different languages for each purpose? Are…
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When people who can’t think logically design large systems, those systems become incomprehensible. And we start thinking of them as biological systems. And since biological systems are too complex to…
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In retrospect, thinking of programs as automobiles wasn’t so bad. Automobiles are pretty simple. If their car stops working, people expect any good mechanic to be able to figure out why and fix the pr…
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An automobile runs, a program does not. (Computers run, but I’m not discussing them.) An automobile requires maintenance, a program does not. A program does not need to have its stack cleaned every 10…
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I actually have a nice slide for that, which shows a two-year-old kid using an iPad, and an 85-year-old lady using an iPad. And then the next thing shows both of them in walkers. Because that’s what A…
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leftoversalad:…
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… the cost of making a change to a dynamic system is proportional to the size of the change, whereas the cost of making the same change in a static system is generally proportional to the size of the…
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Operating systems are dauntingly complex and totally unnecessary. It’s a brilliant thing Bill Gates has done in selling the world on the notion of operating systems. It’s probably the greatest con the…