When I’m writing Scheme code, I get the feeling that there’s some kind of music being played; and from time to time I’ll actually hear a snippet of something. The answers all come to me in time, slowly unfolding, whispering to me light as the breeze.

...

All this, of course, means jack when you know what the problem is, you know how to solve it, and the damned computer keeps on getting in your way with its silly, arbitrary and aesthetically disgusting rules. LISP has no inherent concept of a 32–bit address space or a 64k memory segment, but the Intel 80x86 architecture sure as hell does.

...

When the rubber meets the road, you want to be the one holding the gun to your computer’s CPU. Practical languages are that gun. Write in Ada95, in C, in C++—it doesn’t matter, really, anywhere near so much as does the fact that you have Godlike control over the hardware. “You,” you can shout, “I want a full 32–bit far pointer from you, right now, and don’t give me any lip! You! Over there! Yes, you! You’re my new 64k address space.

...

When I’m in the middle of a deep C groove, I can almost hear Maxwell’s demons screaming in agony as they flip the transistors inside my CPU, begging, pleading for mercy. The output of my C code is a gift made by millions of subservient, recalcitrant malcontents, an offering to the crazed god who demands of them “flip this” and “set that”.