“Environmental factors can cause an organism’s genes to express differently, even though the genes themselves don’t change.

“Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers.

“The full-time, tenured professors feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault.

But my students and I are of a piece. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers.

“The best way to learn music is by performing. And the best way to perform is in front of a live audience.

“Rewriters are more like XSLT than macros. They can match and replace fairly arbitrary expressions, not just implement things that look like function calls and method calls.

“The great advantage of the fountain pen is that it is slow. Ideas come faster than we can serialize them to paper. Therefore, the ideas are stored in an “accumulation buffer” in the brain. When in the buffer, the ideas interact and purify. If we empty the buffer too soon, we don’t give the ideas enough time to mature and we get half-baked prose.

Code badly written the first time remains buggy and filled with holes no matter how much it is debugged.

“Given the choice between an extremely skilled loner and a competent-but-social programmer, XP teams consistently choose the more social candidate.