There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature, but, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.

Being offended by things is the world's big hobby at the moment. It's almost taken over from wearing goatee beards.

We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.