Jul 25, 2008
“As a writing man I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unwordly enchantment, as though I might be personally held responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
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Jul 24, 2008
“When there is both pain and pleasure associated with your service, work extremely hard to separate them by time and geography.
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Jul 22, 2008
“People say
Miles’ legacy is his music. To me, Miles’ lasting legacy is people like me, people with one parent from each culture who grew up dancing to the same music together.
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Jul 20, 2008
“Viroids (discovered 1971) are plant pathogens that consist of a few hundred nucleobases of RNA without the protein coat that is typical for viruses. Viroid RNA does not code for any protein—it replicates using the
messenger RNA of the host, and it seems to induce symptoms by
RNA silencing.
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Jul 20, 2008
Preston Bannister: C++ is an extension of C. In every way C is good, C++ is
exactly as good.
me: To ask what a language
allows is to miss the point. What does the language encourage? By technology or by culture?
PB: A mediocre programmer can write very bad code in C++. For a good programmer C++ is always and without exception a better tool than C.
me:
Code must also be
read, with minimal friction. Friction doesn’t just come from bad programmers. It can also come from
lots of competent programmers fluent in different subsets of a language.
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Jul 20, 2008
Linus Torvalds: ..now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.
me: That doesn’t have be a big deal. Rewriting becomes more normal when you have automated tests.
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Jul 20, 2008
“I will tolerate a buggy compiler, lack of editor/IDE/debugger/profiler support, crappy syntax, gotchas in semantics, pretty much anything, if a language easily and naturally supports automated tests.
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Jul 20, 2008
“Environmental factors can cause an organism’s genes to express differently, even though the genes themselves don’t change.
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Jul 17, 2008
“Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers.
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