Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful. Kierkegaard was a strong proponent for the individual against “the crowd” and has some serious discussion of the importance of aesthetics and ethical behavior. I couldn’t point to a specific language feature and say, “See, there’s the influence of the nineteenth-century philosopher,” but he is one of the roots of my reluctance to eliminate “expert level” features, to abolish “misuses,” and to limit features to support only uses that I know to be useful. I’m not particularly fond of Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy, though.

And without real changes in user behavior, software suppliers are unlikely to change.

People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now.

Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just “sort of evolved” into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will.