“Some properties should not be changed. The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, and you want it to stay that way. Error and status flags will often be hard-coded into your classes. Although they should be publicly and statically available, client code should not be able to change them.”
“Methods like this act as “factories” in that they take raw materials (such as row data, for example, orconfiguration information) and use them to produce objects. The term factory is applied to codedesigned to generate object instances.”
“Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.”
“What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins”
“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. ”
“Too often, the notion of progress is used as a code word for perfection, the chain of being in a different guise. The term should be employed with caution. Some see an arrow of time in biology, as in physics, but in the opposite direction- a relentless tendency to improve, just as a universe has a built-in trend towards chaos and disorder. That is too optimistic. Some lineages get more complicated, some simpler, and much of life has to struggle to stay in the same place. If everyone is evolving, nobody can afford to stop, and there may be constant change with no overall advance at all. ”
“Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.”