“This discussion has now reached such a point of vagueness that for all you know you could be saying the same things. Since any actual disagreement between you is smaller than the (enormous) imprecision of each of your statements, all that’s left driving this is your animosity to one another.

“Code should be read as poetry instead of prose.

“Go ask your front line people what they’re doing when they’re doing what they think is their jobs. Like when they’re ripping tickets or answering the phone or filling out a form with a customer. How many say, “I’m using this as an excuse to market to our best customers”?

“It is often said that reverse swing is poorly understood, but it’s a simple and straightforward technique that you can try in your own backyard. If there is any kind of swing bowling that is shrouded in mystery it is, in fact, the conventional variety. It is more of a natural gift over which the bowler exercises uncertain control. As Bob Massie’s famous example shows, you can sometimes go an entire career without being able to reproduce it.

“The question that should be asked is not: “Who among the regulators is corrupt or so selfishly motivated as to disregard the ‘public interest?‘” The question that should be asked is: “Who among us is the most powerful and most capable of deeply capturing our exteriors and interiors and, even, of capturing what we mean by the ‘public interest?‘

“Professional and business social networking sites will find it more difficult to compete if Facebook is able to successfully allow people to distinguish between their various social graphs.

“In Ruby if I decide that all string comparisons must become case-insensitive, I can do that. In python, there is no way I can do that. This dynamism makes Ruby much more suitable for “tinkering”, but Python equally more suitable for use in large production applications.

It’s funny, because both languages are so much more dynamic than most others, that in the end the key difference between them should hinge on this issue.

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

“Shorter code is better if it expresses underlying relationships better.