“In exploratory programming, it’s as important to avoid premature specification as premature optimization.

“zip is matrix transpose in disguise.

“If you’re interested in deriving maximum benefit from your work, there’s no substitute for making it public and findable. Obscurity sucks. But obscurity by choice is irrational. When in doubt, make it public.

“Leaving Unicode support in a language “for later” means you will spend a huge chunk of time sometime in the future to put it into the language — or you won’t, and then programs written in that language will forever be verbose when dealing with strings.

“When we look back someday at our juggling of electronic lives, the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Cinematic shorthand for the frenzy [glamour?] of modern life.

“Under no circumstance should you punish your users for using your system.

“If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting.. if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.

“To measure the large amount of energy produced in a supernova per second, specialists occasionally use a unit of energy known as a “foe”, an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power] fifty-one ergs. In comparison, if the Sun had its current luminosity throughout its entire 10-billion-year lifetime, it would produce 1.2 foe.

“The disease metaphor for viral marketing is misleading. Trends are more like forest fires: there are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. In those rare situations, the landscape is ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do.

“Common Lisp makes the classic lisp error of confusing symbols (a data type) with variables (a language level object).