“A well-written program in an abstract language like Ocaml or Lisp has the quality of an elegant mathematical proof: beautiful and concise, but you can’t change anything without breaking it. Most programs in C++ are more like an elaborate model train layout, supporting endless tinkering without actually stopping the train from going ‘round.

The ideal language would let you write functionality quickly and concisely like a high-level language, but let you tinker and optimize to your heart’s content. To support these two goals, it needs to read two separate sets of source code: a high-level part and an optional low-level part that guides compiler optimizations.

“A satisfied customer isn’t necessarily a loyal customer; today’s satisfied customer might find even more satisfaction in your competitor’s offerings tomorrow.

“If you’re the district manager for the Yukon Territory and the company stops serving the Yukon, you’re going to get fired, aren’t you? It’s no wonder groupthink and politics and natural defenses kick in every time strategy is discussed.

The thing is, in most organizations, when the Yukon gets shut down, the district manager does get laid off. Big mistake. As soon as management starts conflating people with tasks, they’ve guaranteed that the organization is going to get stuck.

A better plan: rotate your people and continually reward and promote and challenge them. Make a big deal when someone makes the case for shutting down her task. Make it really clear through your actions that tasks come and go, but good people stay.

“I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing.

“The notion of going on a hike, camping, fishing or backpacking is foreign to a growing number of young people in cities and suburbs around the nation. Nature is increasingly an abstraction you watch on a nature channel. If so, it’s unlikely you will have many qualms about pulling the loaded gun’s trigger. It’s just another mashup.

“The Principle of Computational Equivalence: when one sees behavior that isn’t obviously simple, it’ll always correspond to a maximally sophisticated computation.

“Nobody in academia seems to like Hofstadter or Minsky.

The neuroscientists deplore the absence of rigorous experiments and the refusal to canvass the relevant experimental literature thoroughly. Where are the data? The philosophers of mind find few formal arguments and a frustratingly cavalier refusal to define their terms at the outset. Where are the proofs? The cognitive psychologists are offended that they don’t see the need to adjudicate between all the competing models and theories that have been painstakingly developed and defended, and instead offer their own impressionistic and oversimplified sketches. Where are the models that make testable predictions? The artificial intelligence crowd wants to see a running demo program. Where is the code? It’s all just speculation! And then there is the style, too clever and playful, apparently written for bright high school students, not professors and graduate students.

“The business model of today’s internet giants might best be called vampiric. Their overriding goal is to know us, to transfer into their databases the informational life-blood of our selves. Their thirst is insatiable. To survive, they must uncover ever more intimate details of our lives and desires. And we are not averse to the seduction. We embrace these companies, welcome them into our homes, because we desire the gifts they bear and the conveniences they provide. We tilt our necks to them freely.

“Imperative programming is more susceptible to premature optimization [than functional programming].