"In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion."

“Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form ‘How do I use X to accomplish Y?’ There's nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems.”

“Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.”

“A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything. I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!”

“You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!”