“In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

“..while anyone’s reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects. One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a few days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting. Another is to stand close. A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you’re therefore seeing for the first time.

“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’