“A well-designed toy:

* Makes a request. It asks you to “Play with me”. This is why you are compelled to touch it.

* Is fantastically straightforward. The design suggests, “When you pick me up, it’s going to be clear what’s going on.” This is why great toys never have manuals.

* Has hidden potential. A toy is going to hook you with some clever visual, but the real value is something you can not see, but must find.

Toy interfaces are great at turning a terribly complex idea into a simple interface. Giving your users a toy, an interface that is going to invite them to play, is also going to invite them to explore, and when they’re exploring, they’re learning.

“I don’t believe it’s possible to write a non-portable Common Lisp program that’s relevant to the free software community. You can try, but you will fail. Your program will either become portable or be replaced by one that is.

But it’s not all roses. We’ve invested a lot of time in adding features and fine details for our Lisp of choice that most of our friends won’t ever appreciate. I spent a few weekends working on the SBCL backend out of sheer horror at the way so many people were experiencing SLIME. I wish somehow we’d all experience it in the same way automatically.

“Reddit did well to maintain flexibility with regard to business model choices, making itself available to OEM opportunities rather than just building Reddit as a destination site.

“PIDA is different from other IDEs in that it will use the tools you already have available [vim, etc.] rather than attempting to reinvent each one.

“..if I were launching a new website, here’s what I’d do. Instead of hiding the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner, I’d place a form right on the main page. A big form. And I’d bend over backwards to get people to use it.

“Getting a reply increases satisfaction along four dimensions. It increases current benefit, it increases expected future benefit, it creates a common bond with the individuals who posted replies, and it increases identification with the group as a whole.

“The type discipline of Qi is based on sequent notation which is a much more powerful and flexible tool for defining types than that used in ML or Haskell.

“What can you do feel more ease at work? Act responsibly: “I belong here, and it’s ok to have my particular skills here, and my limitations, too. My code works, the work that I do is important to somebody else.” Make all status information public: “I make public commitments, I make myself accountable. Transparency at work yields freedom from fear of embarrassment.” Value feedback appropriately: take it in context, be realistic; don’t give in to flattery or attack.

“..this is where our senior managers, with hundreds of presentations under their belts, screw up. They’ve stopped fretting, which means their presentations lack any sort of energy. They don’t listen to the audience, so when the audience asks for something, they don’t give it. This is why they sound like bad used car salesmen; they’re just reciting the sales pitch and they don’t care what you think.