A list of my favorite quotes.

Only rarely does some exceptional event lead people to reorganize their intellectual self-image in such a way as to open up new perspectives on what is learnable

• Seymour Papert, Mindstorms

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

– Leslie Lamport

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve. (This was evidently not understood by the author that wrote —in 1977— in the preface of a technical report that "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided for the sake of clarity". The occurrence of that sentence suggests that the author's misunderstanding is not confined to him alone.) When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.

– Edsger W.Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

– Bertrand Russel

malloc for the internet

– Jeff Bezos's original spec for s3

Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating

– Bret Victor