"Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won."

"My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before codin…"

"If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculati…"

"I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a…"

"Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics."