“The people who think that pure languages let you automagically parallelise all your code are usually the same people who think they give you built-in memoization for free, and they’re both equally wrong.

“I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in Physics than by drugs.

“Friends don’t let friends commit centralized.

“In order to attract more eaters, an all-you-can-eat restaurant added ingredients to the salad bar, hoping to make it a better value and more diverse. Already confronted by too many choices, customers would shrink back to the standard salad they knew how to make. The result: customers self-reinforced their notion that the place was only about a single dish — whatever they ate the most.

“Lately my kids have been very interested in programming, and I’ve found that Python doesn’t come as easily to 6-11 year olds as it does to adult programmers.

“I avoid such routine questions as “What do you like to do outside of work?” or worse, “Tell me about your greatest failure.” It’s better to ask a candidate to solve tough problems and engage in other exercises that will help you understand their thought process.

“If you’re watching this^video and you’re a Wii game developer, I wanna see some games that use head tracking.

“The character of a [social] site’s comment threads is a time-delayed function of the top stories.

“Being the best in the world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.

“To darcs, patches exist in time at the earliest point at which they apply cleanly. The crazy thing is, it figures this out at the latest time possible.