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Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.

— Paul Graham

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More quotes by Paul Graham

Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.

A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.

The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Graham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.