Quotes of the week

There's no better way to celebrate the release of NetworkManager 0.9.2 than a sip of ice-cold cocktail. It's something pink-colored - I don't know what - and it's phenomenal. And if I ever run out, I just ring a bell and somebody fills it up! It's basically like Paradise, except Paradise doesn't have the latest version of NetworkManager. Here's a hot tip: make your first half billion and buy yourself a private island. Then move there and write open-source software for fun. It's a pretty great life. After a hard day on the beach bending networks to my will, I wind down by building buried hatches solely to confuse the island's next owner (I'm trading up to a private archipelago in a few years).

"Just hit next" is a *feature*. It's a sign of good design, and of quality. It's also a really good stability feature because most users just hit next so you know which path to test the crap out of.

Trying to use a backslash in a way that runs counter to the lexical texture of the language is as disrespectful of that lexical texture as was Microsoft's idiotic decision to use backslash as a path separator, forever cursing programmers to have to double it up any time they want to use it.

When a language has single guiding designer, whether Dennis and Ken for C, or Larry in Perl, you don't get these paradoxical and counterintuitive warts that make no sense taken in the larger context of that language.

When you have a hundred million people who *do*not*share* the lexical sensitivity and sensibility of the language's designer adding oh-by-way exceptions and special corner cases, you run the risk of corrupting the self-reinforcing *beauty* of that original vision with disruptive noise, destroying the unifying aesthetic by cluttering it with abnormal exceptions that break all the metarules of that language.