Being a programmer is the same way. The only way to be a good programmer is to write code. When you realize you haven't been writing much code lately, and it seems like all you do is brag about code you wrote in the past, and people start looking at you funny while you're shooting your mouth off, realize it's because they know. They might not even know they know, but they know. So, yes, doing what you love brings success, and by all means, throw yourself a nice big party, buy yourself a nice car, soak up the adulation of an adoring crowd. Then shut the fuck up and get back to work. -- Sincerity Theory

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

What Paul does, and does very well, is to take ideas and concepts that are beautiful in the abstract, and brings them down to a real world level. That's a rare talent to find in writing these days. -- Jeff "hemos" Bates, Director, OSDN; Co-evolver, Slashdot

You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people. -- Matz, LL2

You have to write for your audience. I would never write (1..5).map &'*2' in Java when I could write ListFactoryFactory.getListFactoryFromResource( new ResourceName('com.javax.magnitudes.integers'). setLowerBound(1).setUpperBound(5).setStep(1).applyFunctor( new Functor () { public void eval (x) { return x * 2; } })) I'm simplifying, of course, I've left out the security and logging wrappers. -- Reginald Braithwait

The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do. ~Anonymous

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ~Thomas A. Edison

Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them. ~Anonymous

A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them. ~Henry Kravis