Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.