The Tools We Use Have

The Prisoner Falls In Love With His Chains.

How Do We Convince People That In Programming Simplicity And Clarity - In Short: What Mathematicians Call Elegance - Are Not A Dispensable Luxury, But A Crucial Matter That Decides Between Success And Failure?

We Are All Shaped By The Tools We Use, In Particular: The Formalisms We Use Shape Our Thinking Habits, For Better Or For Worse, And That Means That We Have To Be Very Careful In The Choice Of What We Learn And Teach, For Unlearning Is Not Really Possible.

So-called "natural Language" Is Wonderful For The Purposes It Was Created For, Such As To Be Rude In, To Tell Jokes In, To Cheat Or To Make Love In (and Theorists Of Literary Criticism Can Even Be Content-free In It), But It Is Hopelessly Inadequate When We Have To Deal Unambiguously With Situations Of Great Intricacy, Situations Which Unavoidably Arise In Such Activities As Legislation, Arbitration, Mathematics Or Programming.

I Mentioned The Non-competitive Spirit Explicitly, Because These Days, Excellence Is A Fashionable Concept. But Excellence Is A Competitive Notion, And That Is Not What We Are Heading For: We Are Heading For Perfection.