Quotes of the Week: (from Haskell Digest, Vol 41, Issue 1)

* cjeris: It's amazing what some languages do to make thinking impossible, seemingly justified by the assumption that no one thinks anyway, so it's more important to make non-thinking programming as easy as possible.

You may be interested in the following quotes: Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947): "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." [Example: compare long division with Roman numerals and Arabic numerals] Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." Joe Stoy: "If you want to reduce ... design time, you have to stop thinking about something you used to have to think about." Nikhil