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Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.

— Gerald Jay Sussman

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More quotes by Gerald Jay Sussman

I have been the PhD thesis supervisor of almost 50 wonderful graduate students. Many of them have become fine teachers. And ideas from my books have influenced some high-school curricula.

The essential idea is best captured by the introductory paragraph of the foreword to the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language

I do not think that the impact of Scheme has sunk into the culture of computing even now. People make elaborate languages that provide shortcuts and “conveniences” that tend to hide the ideas in their programs, rather than expose them.

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