I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” - because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

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

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.