Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile

You would need an engineering degree from MIT to work this, someone told me, shaking his head in puzzlement over his brand new digital watch. Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT. (Kenneth Olsen^* has two of them, and he can't figure out a microwave oven.)

Donald A. Norman. The Design of Everyday Things.

Какое прекрасное начало книги, которая формально является одним из моих учебников. Я уже третий год не могу разобраться со своей микроволновкой глубже кнопки “Reheat”, поэтому глубоко сопереживаю автору.

*: Kenneth Olsen — основатель DEC.

“Computer scientists don't like rigor. We are always sloppy... because we're just not good enough to be mathematicians.”

— David Karger, while explaining the splay trees black magic.

"Coupling leads to complexity
 Complexity leads to confusion
 Confusion leads to suffering
 Once you start down the dark path,
 forever will it dominate your
 destiny, consume you it will"

-- старая лекция по зависимостям

"You need to have a very perverse imagination if you are a software developer."
                              -- Prof. Daniel Jackson, Lab in Software Engineering

Сижу, проверяю математическую олимпиаду. "Коллега"-аспирант демонстрирует многогранность языка, комментируя очередную работу, "Bullshit doesn't sweeten crap." "Коллега"-профессор держится посолиднее, но все же позволяет себе ремарку в адрес автора другой работы, "I wish I could go to his school and kick his ass."

Из вчерашнего IM-трепа:

- My dad had a friend who came from Russia and this person didn't speak English yet,
  so he wanted a job he could do with his hands. When he was looking for this job,
  he went to various places and the phrase he used was "can you give me a hand job"
  ...nobody wanted to give him one:-)
- LOL:)
- It would have been even funnier if someone had agreed:-)

- Recently, I wanted to know how to say pollution in Russian, so I asked my grandfather
  whether palutsiya would be the proper way

Лекция по Ruby on Rails

You'll find that Ruby is a lot like Lisp except it has syntax which is unfortunate.

You could be a responsible PHP programmer and write unit tests but nobody does that 'cause it sucks.

As my friend's told me, if your computer says everything is OK, something is definetely not OK.

So what are we gonna call our class? Person? ... No ... Punk? ... No ... Bum is shorter.

I am a Postgres kid. Don't use MySQL 'cause it's just a piece of crap.

Q: You told us that database tables are nicely mapped into Ruby classes, is that always so?
A: No, I just like to make shit up.

"If you do not learn how to use double, it will bite you in the ass when you least expect it."
(реализуя Comparator <Ball>) "... the method with two balls ..."
--девочка-инструктор

"Instead of writing up a bunch of shit now, just return null to make Eclipse happy."
--мальчик-инструктор

"Well, Scheme is very complex. I'm not even gonna compare it to Java."
-- инструктор

Жизнь это трагедия для тех, кто чувствует и комедия, для тех, кто думает.

-- Horace Walpole

Слишком сладких плодов не любит воин. Поэтому любит он женщину; в самой сладкой женщине есть еще горькое.

-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Я понял, в чем ваша беда. Вы слишком серьезны. Серьезное лицо - еще не признак ума, господа. Все глупости на Земле делаются именно с этим выражением. Вы улыбайтесь, господа, улыбайтесь!

-- Григорий Горин