Jul 20, 2008
“Viroids (discovered 1971) are plant pathogens that consist of a few hundred nucleobases of RNA without the protein coat that is typical for viruses. Viroid RNA does not code for any protein—it replicates using the
messenger RNA of the host, and it seems to induce symptoms by
RNA silencing.
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Jul 20, 2008
Preston Bannister: C++ is an extension of C. In every way C is good, C++ is
exactly as good.
me: To ask what a language
allows is to miss the point. What does the language encourage? By technology or by culture?
PB: A mediocre programmer can write very bad code in C++. For a good programmer C++ is always and without exception a better tool than C.
me:
Code must also be
read, with minimal friction. Friction doesn’t just come from bad programmers. It can also come from
lots of competent programmers fluent in different subsets of a language.
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Jul 20, 2008
Linus Torvalds: ..now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.
me: That doesn’t have be a big deal. Rewriting becomes more normal when you have automated tests.
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Jul 20, 2008
“I will tolerate a buggy compiler, lack of editor/IDE/debugger/profiler support, crappy syntax, gotchas in semantics, pretty much anything, if a language easily and naturally supports automated tests.
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Jul 20, 2008
“Environmental factors can cause an organism’s genes to express differently, even though the genes themselves don’t change.
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Jul 17, 2008
“Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers.
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Jul 17, 2008
“The full-time, tenured professors feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault.
But my students and I are of a piece. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers.
—
Anonymous professor at a college of last resort
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Jul 15, 2008
“The best way to learn music is by performing. And the best way to perform is in front of a live audience.
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Jul 15, 2008
“Rewriters are more like XSLT than macros. They can match and replace fairly arbitrary expressions, not just implement things that look like function calls and method calls.
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