“Consider a skyscraper of exceptional beauty. When you are one kilometer away, you notice its shape, its overall form, and perhaps its relationship to its geography. Come closer, to 500 meters, and the overall form that was beautiful at 1km fades away. But in a seamless progression, it is replaced by the relationship of base to the tower; by the shape of the windows and the color and shadows of the building’s facets. Come in to 100 meters.. The point is that the architect did not consider beauty only at one scale.. The good design morphs as you approach and retreat, surprising and delighting you with new aspects of its beauty.

“We don’t want to play politics. But encouraging people’s competitive feelings? Oh, yes.

“We know that one can exaggerate anything to make a point, and yet it is easy to fall into the trap of ending up with an extreme viewpoint because one can’t decide where to draw the line.

“I’ve been resisting the idea, but I have to say that this is starting to feel like another Bubble.

“[Searching for] more and more powerful ways to express and manipulate control structure to support heuristic search in MIT’s quest for the ‘ultimate AI language’, we had come full circle from Lisp to CONVERT to Planner to Conniver to PLASMA to a simple variation of Lisp!

The original theoretical core of Lisp was recursion equations, not the lambda-calculus. An important consequence of the existence of a [scheme] interpreter for the lambda-calculus was that suddenly a denotational semantics could be regarded as an operational semantics.

“The data-parallel languages of the future will be functional languages. Key transformations: Flattening and fusion. Both depend utterly on purely-functional semantics.

“..while collaborative coding on a single function isn’t that useful, collaborative property discussion works really well.

“..UUCP was the first [computer program] to use the tilde to mean ‘home directory’

“A karass is a team of people that does God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Humanity is organized into many such teams. One can try to discover the limits of one’s karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do, but such investigations are bound to be incomplete.

“Leo is an outlining editor for literate programming and a multi-view project manager..