“If you want to build a community, or to be in the business of letting your readers talk to each other about what you write, enable comments in your blog. If not, move along. There’s lots of others building communities where they can chat about you.

“Posting and conversation are different modes of expression. The sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any “everyone post to their own blog”.

“Shorter operator names sounds like a pretty superficial feature. But they mean you don’t have to break lines so often, which in turn means that you can see more of your program at once. The biggest win is in the names of operators that tend to be outermost in nested expressions, like map, progn, and lambda.

Operator overloading should be subsumed in the more general question, how should you define a new type?

Macros and implicit local variables just don’t seem to work well together. Any language that already has implicit local variables will run into trouble if they try to add macros.

“I’m always flirting with some new idea… and I’m never content unless I have some crazy mad-scientist scheme being developed in some obscure folder on my hard drive. And these other guys… they just never have anything technical they want to talk about. There’s never a technique or idea or tool that they get excited about and have to discuss over lunch. They’re are actually content with the status-quo… which is strange given how annoying and unreliable things can be. And if I go off on some technical tangent… there’s actually someone around that’s going to call me a nerd. Dude: we’re computer programmers. We code for a living. Aren’t we nerds by definition?!

“Programming languages teach us not to want what they do not provide.

“In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they’ll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.

“One of the downsides of many Lisps is that they put too much emphasis on application rather than composition. For example, (mapcar (lambda (x) (f (g x))) list) is more awkward than (mapcar (compose f g) list) or [ g f ] map

“Valuation is temporary, control is forever.

“Investors who want to increase their percent ownership try to drive down the next round’s valuation.