The Little MLer

from Matthias Felleisen's Homepage

(http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/index.html)

i-con-o-clast n. 1. One who destroys sacred images. 2. One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. The American Heritage Dictionary Wordsmith

An Element of Style Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Rule 12, William Strunk, Jr.

Q: What is the shortest lie in computing? A: It works.

On Programming: A bad day writing code in Scheme is better than a good day writing code in C. David Stigant

More on Programming: Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. John F. Woods

Yet more on Programming: Programming is just another name for the lost art of thinking. Arctic Fidelity aka Aaron Hsu

On Teaching Programming: Wir sind froh, dass die Absolventen schon Java können. Programmieren müssen wir denen halt noch beibringen. overheard in a German firm, via Mike Sperber

More on Teaching Programming: You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up. C. A. R. Hoare

On Mutation: Assignment leads to mutation. Mutation leads to pointers. Pointers lead to suffering! Anton van Straaten

On Research: I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show that you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. Richard P. Feynman, "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman"