Philip Greenspun
Philip Greenspun
Philip Greenspun is a semi-retired American computer scientist, educator, and early Internet entrepreneur who was a pioneer in developing online communities. His blog, hosted by Harvard Law School, contains his opinions on diverse subjects, from politics, to technology, to even divorce and discrimination law...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 September 1963
CountryUnited States of America
thinking language haskell
SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
believe thinking astrology
I don't myself believe in astrology. However, I think that's because I'm a Libra and Libras are always skeptical.
thinking three mit
Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.
stupid taken thinking
Frame is a good enough piece of software that there are actually rewards to taking an intelligent and formal approach to your problem. But if you want to be stupid, you can think of Frame as a version of Microsoft Word with most of the bugs taken out.
book consequences huge online publishing
Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected.
million online turned
Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community.
fancy handling pilots
Pilots enjoy the fun and challenge of handling the fancy machine.
aircraft flight people requires stuff tough turns within
The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course, a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice.
adult bringing cannot constantly home kids merits navigate parent relative second staying system unmarried versus welfare work
An unmarried adult who cannot navigate the welfare system has no choice but to work, but a married working parent is constantly evaluating the relative merits of staying home with the kids versus bringing home that second paycheck.
build desire help leads learned motivation people travels
Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done.
afford baby beginning boomers employers exclude people qualified
That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work.
focus debate university
Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
half bugs common
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
pages collaboration saved
Even the lamest page can be saved by collaboration.