Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.