aestheticles: n. The little-known source of aesthetic reactions. If your whole body feels like going into a fetal position or otherwise double over from the pain of experiencing something exceptionally ugly and inelegant, such as C++, it's because your aestheticles got creamed. http://groups.google.no/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4356934aa0d7c2fe Erik Naggum Beauty has its place, but the search for beauty in software - indeed in most things - at the expense of value is an empty pursuit. IEEE 3/4 09, p. 12 Grady Booch Das Schoenste, was wir erleben koennen, ist das Geheimnisvolle. Albert Einstein Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant. http://groups.google.no/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4bda6a98e5cf0bce Erik Naggum Make it work. Make it right. Make it beautiful. Make it fast. http://www.gungfu.de/facts/wiki/Main/PrematureOptimization Menschen werden nicht dadurch schöner, dass sie weniger Kleidung tragen. Clemens Mühlberger - http://www.emerentia.de/ Clemens Mühlberger Schoene Worte sind nicht wahr.Wahre Worte sind nicht schoen. LaoTse Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code. Eric S. Raymond Without a remembrance of things past, without a trained eyed, we miss the beauty and elegance that's present in the mundane. IEEE 3/4 09, p. 13 Grady Booch XML—which amounts to some fundamental Lisp data structures reinterpreted by people with bad taste brainwashed by inflexibility. http://www.dreamsongs.com/ArtOfLisp.html Richard P. Gabriel