“..it’s constantly amazing how much refactoring [in haskell and factor] is simply moving some set of words from one place to another. Type inference means I don’t have to repeat argument types. Being pointfree means I don’t even have to repeat argument names.

“..the cognitive load required to complete an action is proportional to the number of steps required..

“Using the same tools over and over again means each project starts by fighting the last battle over again..

“Many of the Slashdot trolling phenomena started out on Segfault.org. During its early days, Segfault would allow anybody to comment upon stories.. as time went on more of the posts were troll posts.. Segfault lacked any mechanism to remove trolls.. Eventually it was forced to disable comments. The troll community which had been well established on Segfault, having “killed their host”, sought out a new host to “infect” - Slashdot.

“Don’t bother developers with macros when they aren’t writing one: the language’s syntax and semantics should be best suited for those 95% of the time when we aren’t writing macros.

“In our artificial market.. social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality.

“Because we’ve reached the limits of moore’s law, the computers of the future will have many-core processors and all our programs will need to be written in a combination of haskell and lisp, that will itself be so powerful that the computers of the future will not be able to implement any of our ideas without creating time-travelling algorithms that borrow processing power from other computers that are further into the future. This sounds difficult, but in lisp it isn’t difficult at all. in haskell this is a built-in feature and the way you implement it is just a no-brainer to any one who knows lisp or haskell.

“If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away.

“Whatever you study, include history — but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it’s misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.

“The only team we haven’t bowled out is Bangladesh and that was over 22 overs.