Making Things Easy Is Hard.

Telling Computer Guys That They Need To Have Permission To Quote Things Is Like Having To Tell Little Children About Death.

The Ideas Keep Going, You Have The Material, You Cut Because There's A Limit To The Space Allowed To You. And The Space Is Limited Because Of Some Other Constraints That Have To Do With Money Or Printing Or Whatever.

I Am A Design Chauvinist. I Believe That Good Design Is Magical And Not To Be Lightly Tinkered With. The Difference Between A Great Design And A Lousy One Is In The Meshing Of The Thousand Details That Either Fit Or Don't, And The Spirit Of The Passionate Intellect That Has Tied Them Together, Or Tried. That's Why Programming - Or Buying Software - On The Basis Of "lists Of Features" Is A Doomed And Misguided Effort. The Features Can Be Thrown Together, As In A Garbage Can, Or Carefully Laid Together And Interwoven In Elegant Unification, As In Apl, Or The Forth Language, Or The Game Of Chess.

The Point Is That These Decisions They've Made Are Partly For Your Convenience And Partly For Theirs And Partly Out Of Stereotypes That They Carry With Them From The Conventions Of The Computer Field.

The Good News About Computers Is That They Do What You Tell Them To Do. The Bad News Is That They Do What You Tell Them To Do.