“Analytical software is necessary but not sufficient. Narrated animation is the secret sauce. The stories that people will understand, and remember, are the ones that have been performed well.

“[When remixing websites,] the dynamic script tag’s main advantages are that it is not bound by the web browser’s cross-domain security restrictions and that it runs identically on more web browsers than XMLHttpRequest. Feature-wise, the XMLHttpRequest object is still a more reliable, flexible, and secure request mechanism.

“Village games are a distinct service-based offering that is separate from other forms of games. They certainly aren’t retail titles. They aren’t ‘indie’ or ‘casual games’ either. They are quirky, isolated communities much like a traditional village or small town. The communities tend to be a bit more friendly and insular then their larger city-sized brethren such as Everquest or World of Warcraft. The game design tends to be a bit more unique and able to take risks. Such game companies usually started with a small community numbering in the thousands. Many customers have been with them for years. Each operates either a micropayment or a subscription model that doesn’t cap the amount of money the customer wishes to spend. They focus on a niche experience that is not provided by larger retail titles.

“Ajax is quite overused. I don’t think a lot of people have thought through the scalability implications of increasing the number of concurrent server connections by an order of magnitude.

“If you want to build a community, or to be in the business of letting your readers talk to each other about what you write, enable comments in your blog. If not, move along. There’s lots of others building communities where they can chat about you.

“Posting and conversation are different modes of expression. The sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any “everyone post to their own blog”.

“Shorter operator names sounds like a pretty superficial feature. But they mean you don’t have to break lines so often, which in turn means that you can see more of your program at once. The biggest win is in the names of operators that tend to be outermost in nested expressions, like map, progn, and lambda.

Operator overloading should be subsumed in the more general question, how should you define a new type?

Macros and implicit local variables just don’t seem to work well together. Any language that already has implicit local variables will run into trouble if they try to add macros.

“I’m always flirting with some new idea… and I’m never content unless I have some crazy mad-scientist scheme being developed in some obscure folder on my hard drive. And these other guys… they just never have anything technical they want to talk about. There’s never a technique or idea or tool that they get excited about and have to discuss over lunch. They’re are actually content with the status-quo… which is strange given how annoying and unreliable things can be. And if I go off on some technical tangent… there’s actually someone around that’s going to call me a nerd. Dude: we’re computer programmers. We code for a living. Aren’t we nerds by definition?!

“Programming languages teach us not to want what they do not provide.