“A lot of the dissatisfaction with computer science comes from the misplaced expectation that a computer science graduate will be a good programmer. Computer science and software engineering are very different disciplines. Software engineering teaches the process of developing software, in terms of both tools and processes. A computer science course only briefly touches on these topics, in the same way that a materials physicist may learn something of mechanical engineering.

“It’s time to quit pandering to Mort with our condescending paternalistic attitude, and instead demand better from him.

“Test-driven development is akin to double-entry accounting.

“Hacker News is now perhaps my favorite social network, even though it doesn’t look anything like one, and it doesn’t include most of my best friends in the real world. I think there’s a lesson here.

“The 2008 US Presidential race will be a $1-billion election. To be taken seriously, a candidate will need to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2007.

“While big dollar-holding countries such as China, Singapore, Russia and the Persian Gulf states are very worried about the erosion in value of their dollar-denominated holdings, they also know that an abrupt move to cut their pegs to the dollar would force a run on the currency, leaving them even poorer. Instead these countries are pursuing careful reallocations of their investment holdings that will allow them to hedge against the dollar’s decline.

“Whereas with other languages splitting your code into neat composable blocks is considered good practice, in Factor you simply don’t have any choice: you can’t just keep parking state on the stack. Anything exceeding 3 variables and a single line of code and the cognitive load starts to ramp up exponentially. This may make Factor the ultimate teaching language. In other languages the novice programmer can write a lot of procedural code using just functional decomposition before feeling the pressure to look for other abstractions. With Factor that pressure is there almost from the start, and the novice is constantly forced to scan the big picture of abstraction possibilities.

“Since a program’s output can be considered a side-effect, the only thing you can use pure functional programming for is warming-up your server.

“MVC is an elegant design pattern, but an MVC framework must provide a simple way for components to include other components.

“Find a way to do your work with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception: fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.