Aug 1, 2008
“No one ever tells us about the interesting, unconventional job that 15% of the people in our major end up in. That’s what we really want to know: What do people actually wind up doing with my background? Where do people like me work, and where can they work in the future? Well, all that information is actually out there—it’s in our collective resumes.
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Jul 25, 2008
“I have met but one or two persons who have understood the art of Walking, who have had a genius for
sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages and asked charity, under pretense of going
a la Sainte Terre to the Holy Land, until the children exclaimed, “There goes a
Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer.
Every walk is a sort of crusade, but we are but faint-hearted crusaders nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return. If you are ready to leave behind father and mother, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
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Jul 25, 2008
“As a writing man I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unwordly enchantment, as though I might be personally held responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
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Jul 24, 2008
“When there is both pain and pleasure associated with your service, work extremely hard to separate them by time and geography.
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Jul 22, 2008
“People say
Miles’ legacy is his music. To me, Miles’ lasting legacy is people like me, people with one parent from each culture who grew up dancing to the same music together.
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Jul 20, 2008
“Viroids (discovered 1971) are plant pathogens that consist of a few hundred nucleobases of RNA without the protein coat that is typical for viruses. Viroid RNA does not code for any protein—it replicates using the
messenger RNA of the host, and it seems to induce symptoms by
RNA silencing.
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Jul 20, 2008
Preston Bannister: C++ is an extension of C. In every way C is good, C++ is
exactly as good.
me: To ask what a language
allows is to miss the point. What does the language encourage? By technology or by culture?
PB: A mediocre programmer can write very bad code in C++. For a good programmer C++ is always and without exception a better tool than C.
me:
Code must also be
read, with minimal friction. Friction doesn’t just come from bad programmers. It can also come from
lots of competent programmers fluent in different subsets of a language.
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Jul 20, 2008
Linus Torvalds: ..now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.
me: That doesn’t have be a big deal. Rewriting becomes more normal when you have automated tests.
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Jul 20, 2008
“I will tolerate a buggy compiler, lack of editor/IDE/debugger/profiler support, crappy syntax, gotchas in semantics, pretty much anything, if a language easily and naturally supports automated tests.
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