“Robert used to get up early, whereas I stayed up ’til four and got up at noon. So we would kind of work a 24-hour schedule. I would write some new code during the night and send him an email. Then he would write the corresponding stuff in his part. So we got code written very fast.

“When you are walking down the street and you see a couple holding hands, there’s like a 98% chance they met in a bar.

“Lina’s virtual Linux machine will run more or less normal Linux applications under Windows, Mac, or Linux, with a look and feel native to each. You have to compile binaries specifically for Lina, but it’s fairly trivial, no different than compiling binaries for SuSE or Red Hat. The VM download currently weighs in at 15MB, and expands to about 40MB after installation.

Open source developers will be able to use Lina for free.. the goal is to bring the huge world of open source software to the masses. Still a tiny company with private funding, Lina hopes to get some help from the community after Lina goes open source next month.

“If you take a job with a company that asks you questions any idiot could answer, sooner or later they’re going to put you on a project with some idiot who answered them. It’s something to watch out for.

The best way to hire programmers is to read their blogs and look at their code.

“OCaml is the practical Haskell.

OCaml is functional, statically typed, and blazingly fast. With OCaml you go from asking why your code is spending 70% of its time collecting garbage to actually trying to polish your code. GHC takes 2-3-4 minutes to rebuild my project whenever I touch the parser. Ocaml takes 1-2-3 seconds. With Haskell I was loath to touch the parser or my syntax tree definition, with OCaml I look forward to tweaking things to my hearts content.

Polymorphic variants in OCaml make creating “macros” easy.. This is not possible in Haskell without boxing your data..

OCaml has built-in marshalling which lets you easily dump data to disk and load it back. ..it’s not hard to marshall your data with Haskell, but it has to be done manually.

“..when you need to optimize highly recursive functions, consider what you can memoize. When nothing obvious presents itself, consider memoizing functions. Further, consider code generation to prepare suitable functions on the fly once each..

“Novelty, improvisation, self-expression, and blinding inspiration were not neoclassical virtues; neoclassicism (1750-1900) was intended to exhibit perfect control of an idiom. It did not recreate art forms from the ground up with each new project, as modernism (1890-) demanded.

“The history of Egypt is the longest continuous history, as a unified state, of any country in the world. The Nile valley forms a natural geographic and economic unit, bounded to the east and west by deserts, to the north by the sea and to the south by the Cataracts of the Nile. The need to have a single authority to manage the waters of the Nile led to the creation of the world’s first state in about 3000 BC. Egypt’s peculiar geography made it a difficult country to attack, which is why Pharaonic Egypt was for so long an independent and self-contained state. Once Egypt did succumb to foreign rule, however, it proved unable to escape from it, and for 2,400 years Egypt was governed by foreigners..

“To be the quickest [at Monaco] you have to touch each barrier, using every inch of the circuit and its very, very tough to do that. You touch it too much you lose a wheel, so it’s all about just brushing the barrier each time..