It’s easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.
You have to wait for the writers influential friends to die, and then for all their followers to die.
A programming language is for thinking for programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of.
Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you’ll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there’s something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier paintings.
Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible.