FiatDev Tumble Log

“ We do not reward excellence in education. We don’t fund it, we don’t demand it, and don’t encourage it.

— Utah House Speaker Greg Curtis (quoted in OpinionJournal - Outside the Box)

“

It’s easy to giggle at the bottled-water-and-Prius vibe of the strike. But if this thing isn’t settled soon, if the old system isn’t replaced, the ruthless lean-machine of the Web is going to strip away the gooey inefficiencies of our sweet business and suddenly, tragically, we’re all going to get paid in the worst, most crushing way: We’re going to get paid what we’re worth, and then only in success.

And no one wants that.

— Rob Long

“ One thing is certain, though: What’s happening right now between Hollywood and the guild isn’t a negotiation. It’s a murder-suicide pact.

— Rob Long

“ Patterns wrap complex architectures with simplistic descriptions. They create wonderful buzzwords that we can use instead of resorting to actual human language descriptions. And they help enforce that feeling that we’re all a part of an elite clique shunned by society not by their choice, but by ours.

— Chet Haase: Male pattern boldness

“ A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.

— stevenf.com: Try Again

“ I don’t believe I began to learn how to program until I started learning Lisp. Everything before this was just reconfiguring someone else’s system or automating someone else’s API.

— lispy in a comment on Two Minutes Hate: “Why Functional Programming is a Pointless Dead End”

Smalltalk videos

“ California has four seasons, the old joke goes: earthquake, fire, flood and drought.

— OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today

“ If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

— Alan Kay (via neontology)

“ Microsoft continues to pour billions into Windows, adding features most users don’t know exist, while spending millions of man-hours to remain “backward compatible” with thousands of aging programs and devices used by ever shrinking numbers of customers.

— OpinionJournal - It’s Your Money

“ Static types give me the same feeling of safety as the announcement that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device.

— Don Roberts (via Martin Fowler)

“ Profit is to be found not just in pleasing dissatisfied customers, but in dissatisfying them in the first place so they will then pay to be pleased.

— I, Cringely: You Can’t Get There From Here

“ And yet, in a typically optimistic programmer triumph of hope over experience, everyone believes that someone, somewhere, is building software the right way, and that we too could make software development predictable and well-behaved if only we possessed sufficient will and discipline.

— Software Is Hard

“ Sometimes software delivery can appear to be about producing optimistic reports to keep senior management happy, or just creating “busy work” to keep people in paid employment, but that’s a topic for another day.

— DanNorth.net » What’s in a Story?

“ There was a time that I called myself a Java Programmer, just like Crazy Bob Lee. Then I grew up. I realized that the real joy of software is the creativity involved, the application itself, not the frameworks used to build it. From that day on I called myself an application developer.

— Obie Fernandez