Elegance Is Not A Dispensable Luxury But

It Used To Be The Program's Purpose To Instruct Our Computers; It Became The Computer's Purpose To Execute Our Programs.

In Their Capacity As A Tool, Computers Will Be But A Ripple On The Surface Of Our Culture. In Their Capacity As Intellectual Challenge, They Are Without Precedent In The Cultural History Of Mankind.

... As A Slow-witted Human Being I Have A Very Small Head And I Had Better Learn To Live With It And To Respect My Limitations And Give Them Full Credit, Rather Than To Try To Ignore Them, For The Latter Vain Effort Will Be Punished By Failure.

Our Intellectual Powers Are Rather Geared To Master Static Relations And That Our Powers To Visualize Processes Evolving In Time Are Relatively Poorly Developed. For That Reason We Should Do (as Wise Programmers Aware Of Our Limitations) Our Utmost To Shorten The Conceptual Gap Between The Static Program And The Dynamic Process, To Make The Correspondence Between The Program (spread Out In Text Space) And The Process (spread Out In Time) As Trivial As Possible.

There Is Very Little Point In Trying To Urge The World To Mend Its Ways As Long As That World Is Still Convinced That Its Ways Are Perfectly Adequate.