Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

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

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

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