“The subject of the debate is more important than the content.

“There is a point in time when you and you only know you cleared the ropes - the rest know it a second later - and it’s the best feeling as a batsman.

“A hydraulic empire is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy. The term can be generalized to cover any power structure maintained by exclusive control of a basic resource needed to live. Though tribal societies had structures that were usually personal in nature, exercised by a patriarch over a tribal group related by various degrees of kinship, hydraulic hierarchies gave rise to the established permanent institution of impersonal government. Most of the first civilizations in history, such as Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, are believed to have been hydraulic empires. The typical hydraulic empire government is extremely centralized, with no trace of an independent aristocracy—in contrast to the decentralized feudalism of medieval Europe.

“Google took on Yahoo by radically cleaning up their homepage. Craigslist is the UI polar opposite: just a home page stuffed with a sea of flat tag links. Craigslist is more Yahoo than Yahoo.

“Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. —Chuang-Tzu

Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I’ll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu’s brevity might not.

“There are only two hard things in CS: cache invalidation and naming things.

“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.