“People ask why you are using a Haskell idiom in Ruby, or a Lisp idiom in Java. One of the answers is that by making functional things look functional, by making OO things look OO, by making distributed things look distributed, and so on, by borrowing paradigms from languages where those ideas are fully exploited, you can make your code signal its intent more clearly.

“Deployment is a logical thing to include in an IDE. If the Web is truly the new development platform, then an IDE should run on the Web.

“The inclination to design and build software by oneself, from scratch, is the single best indicator of [programming] success.

“The ecosystem would make much more sense if it wasn’t designed by a unitary Who but, rather, created by a horde of deities - say from the Hindu or Shinto religions. This handily explains both the ubiquitous purposefulnesses, and the ubiquitous conflicts: The fox and rabbit were both designed, but by distinct competing deities. I wonder if anyone ever remarked on the seemingly excellent evidence thus provided for Hinduism over Christianity. Probably not.

“People either have something they work on in their free time or they don’t. A staggering fraction of the people I know would just switch on the TV, or pick up a book, or idly surf the web or pick up the phone and call someone when they have a couple of hours of free time.

“Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation. It may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

“Like many other forms of motivated skepticism, motivated continuation can try to disguise itself as virtuous rationality. Who can argue against gathering more evidence? I can. Evidence is often costly, and worse, slow, and there is certainly nothing virtuous about refusing to integrate the evidence you already have. You can always change your mind later.

“hard work == discipline == genius is the illusory conclusion made by those on the outside looking in. When you are truly inspired, in the ‘flow’, doesn’t that feel like the easiest, most natural state you have ever experienced?

“Natural selection probably hit its complexity bound no more than a hundred million generations after multicellular organisms got started. Since then, over the last 600 million years, evolutions have substituted new complexity for lost complexity, rather than accumulating adaptations.

“The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it’s implemented in practice. Why? Easy software projects can be done by almost any random person, so they are.