[prodigal_erik]

> What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible effort. - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

After years of working in C++, it took me a long time to come to believe that a lot of that work had really just been wasted effort, optimization decisions far removed from the problem domain that other languages let you completely ignore. Right now I'm enjoying Haskell, but I think JavaScript is going to win (even over Python and Ruby), because it's very easy to get something sloppy but often working and not quite slow enough to be unusable, and that's all customers will pay for.

> When I was a kid I always imagined I'd be normal by now. - http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1586

I spent most of my 20s and 30s just minding the store, not limiting my options, unconsciously waiting for the sane and perfect version of me to show up and do something with my life. But he's not coming. It's just me, and whatever I don't get around to isn't ever going to happen.

And choosing a career that keeps you poor isn't noble but self-indulgent—it pays badly because we already have more people than we need doing the same thing, because that's all they want to do. Money is the measure of how much society actually values your contribution and wants to convince you to keep at it.