Chaos theory When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. - Edward Lorenz Code If you can’t write it down in English, you can’t code it - Peter Halpern, via Jon Bentley Prioritize There is no such thing as two equally urgent projects, only priorities that haven’t been made clear yet. - Unknown Regular expression Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.

Writing about why Emacs is hard for new users, I can’t help but think back to how important it is to name things well. This is not the first time I tried to write about this idea. I don’t think I’ve ever done a great job at it. The thing is, naming things is really the most important way we capture ideas. Every single word we learn is an idea that has been captured and named.

bind Sometimes a synonym for “map” conflate combine disjoint separate, e.g., odd numbers and even numbers are disjoint disjunction inclusive or – if one of the inputs is True extrinsic not intrinsic federated Top-down delegation of responsibilities; Has a single point of failure at the top. PID controller control loop feedback mechanism e.g., curise control 99%ile Abbreviation of percentile EBNF Extended Backus-Naur Form Useful for defining the syntax of a programming language EBNF terminal a token/word/chunk in EBNF Alpha Αα Beta Ββ Gamma Γγ Delta Δδ Commonly denotes ‘difference’ Epsilon Εε Used in Greedy-Epsilon algo for multi-armed bandit problems Error margin in floating point comparisons.