Feb 11

That’s like losing an arm wrestling match to oatmeal! How do you do that?!

Heard on the radio

Jan 26

randomness is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance

The Black Swan : page 120

Jan 21

You know, this idea was a loser in 1989, but it just might work today.” Experience with stuff that didn’t work can be way more valuable than experience with ideas that worked at the time. This would be how Ruby got its yield keyword. Matz knew about a language called CLU, invented in 1974-5 by Barbara Liskov and her students (Yes, she is the Liskov of the Liskov Substitution Principle). Matz borrowed yield from CLU. Was CLU a success in 1975? Perhaps not in the popularity contest. But knowing about this “old failure” allowed Matz to use its ideas in a new way to help make Ruby a “new success.

2009-01-21/old.md at master from raganwald’s homoiconic – GitHub

Jan 07

One news agency, noting its (the newest presidential limousine) 8-inch-thick doors, said the limo can withstand a “direct hit from an asteroid”.

Obama’s New Ride: Heavily-Armored 2009 Cadillac Limo – FOXNews.com

Oct 06

You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can’t. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I’ll show you.

Rands In Repose: Horrible

Sep 26

In most programming languages implementations, the parser produces a syntax
tree data structure by applying the grammar to the source text. The nodes
of the syntax tree are walked or visited by functions that either emit code that
executes, in the case of a compiler, or actually executes, in the case of an interpreter,
the semantic meaning of each construct the programmer used.

katahdin-thesis.pdf