Hackers and the tools they love

Blaine Buxton finds Paul Graham off on a good rant about languages:

"I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java were created for other people to use.

If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots."

Heh - a bit strong - but he's got a point.