Optimism

I was charmed by this talk on optimism and programming languages (written version) by Reg Braithwaite. I also recently read "Learned Optimism" by Dr. Martin Seligman (which I'm not linking to because everyone links to Amazon, and hey, let's buy from our local bookstores instead, what say?)  The talk is pretty long, but it's good, and if you're only interested in the optimism angle (and if you think optimism is dumb, as I used to, you should be), just read until he starts talking about code.