“[Searching for] more and more powerful ways to express and manipulate control structure to support heuristic search in MIT’s quest for the ‘ultimate AI language’, we had come full circle from Lisp to CONVERT to Planner to Conniver to PLASMA to a simple variation of Lisp!

The original theoretical core of Lisp was recursion equations, not the lambda-calculus. An important consequence of the existence of a [scheme] interpreter for the lambda-calculus was that suddenly a denotational semantics could be regarded as an operational semantics.

“The data-parallel languages of the future will be functional languages. Key transformations: Flattening and fusion. Both depend utterly on purely-functional semantics.

“..while collaborative coding on a single function isn’t that useful, collaborative property discussion works really well.

“..UUCP was the first [computer program] to use the tilde to mean ‘home directory’

“A karass is a team of people that does God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Humanity is organized into many such teams. One can try to discover the limits of one’s karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do, but such investigations are bound to be incomplete.

“Leo is an outlining editor for literate programming and a multi-view project manager..

“..since mTurk uses an extrinsic reward system it naturally attracts those jobs that aren’t intrinsically rewarding.

“Repeat after me: the plural of anecdote is not data.

“..it’s constantly amazing how much refactoring [in haskell and factor] is simply moving some set of words from one place to another. Type inference means I don’t have to repeat argument types. Being pointfree means I don’t even have to repeat argument names.

“..the cognitive load required to complete an action is proportional to the number of steps required..