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

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. -- Bill Clinton

The choice of the university is mostly important for the piece of paper you get at the end. The education you get depends on you. -- Andreas Zwinkau

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. -- Paul Graham

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

It’s hard to grasp abstractions if you don’t understand what they’re abstracting away from. -- Nathan Weizenbaum

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. ~Pablo Picasso

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Anonymous

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan