And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky

Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don’t do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. -- M.A. Jackson

Abstraction is a form of data compression: absolutely necessary, because human short-term memory is so small, but the critically important aspect of abstraction is the algorithm that gets you from the name back to the "uncompressed" details. -- Bruce Wilder (blog post comment)

Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file, socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this would necessarily involve a dumbing down. -- VladimirSlepnev

C’s great for what it’s great for. -- Ben Hoyts (micropledge)

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years. -- John Von Neumann, circa 1949

We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. ~Anonymous

You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals. ~Booker T. Washington