Can Your Programming Language Do This? - Joel on Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
"I hope you're convinced, by now, that programming languages with first-class functions let you find more opportunities for abstraction, which means your code is smaller, tighter, more reusable, and more scalable."
Tom White: "Disks have become tapes"
http://www.lexemetech.com/2008/03/disks-have-become-tapes.html
"In essence MapReduce works by repeatedly sorting and merging data that is streamed to and from disk at the transfer rate of the disk. Contrast this to accessing data from a relational database that operates at the seek rate of the disk"