Q. Why Be Positive?
A. It beats the alternative!
Tag: philosophy
What Spending Money Says About You
Money is more than a transfer of value. It’s a statement of belief.
(via Seth)
There are a lot of ways to think about how this applies that might help you to better make sense of why things “work” they way that they do.
Conway's Law
The Grass is Always Greener
Here is a little tongue in cheek developer career philosophy/humor:
(via xkcd via Greg Wilson)
Hamming's Insight
When it Comes to R7RS; R6RS Users are Quiet
R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).
Is It Our Duty to Maintain Our Body?
Suppose that you awoke to find your consciousness contained within a robot. You don’t know where you came from before this existence, you don’t know who gave you this robot, and there is no manual for the time you will spend in this robot.
Is it your duty to maintain your robot?
The Clarity that Tragedy Brings
Sometimes tragedy brings a certain clarity to one’s life. Suddenly, your priorities are clear and things are so simple. You know what matters, and everything else doesn’t. Why is that the case?
When tragedy passes, why does that clarity so easily slip away?
Serious Statistics Programs Pay for the Fun Ones
Here is an article that explains how one of the four co-founders of SAS, a statistician, has an awesome job where the serious product (SAS) pays for him to develop the fun product (JMP).
Note: That is an understatement, as it probably would pay for him to stare at the ocean for the rest of his life if he wanted. It is still a good point, though: sell serious stuff to pay for the fun (for you) stuff.
Why PLT Scheme disllows one-armed ifs
In 1991 I asked Bob Hieb (Kent’s Chez Scheme buddy then, and my co-researcher on theoretical stuff) what the most frequent annoying bug was in the code. He ranked an accidentally omitted else branch among the top three. Indeed, he said that because of this, they had agreed to use WHEN and UNLESS exclusively for cases when they needed a one-armed IF and that they considered all one-armed uses as a bug or a legacy issue (which they corrected as soon as they touched a file).
We have chosen to codify their restriction. It’s a minor inconvenience that buys a good deal of clarity
(via plt)