One of such useful general ideas is to know when to stop. Pilling up meaningless words (or Java-classes, or CL macros) is not just waste of time, it creates ev

One of such useful general ideas is to know when to stop. Pilling up meaningless words (or Java-classes, or CL macros) is not just waste of time, it creates even more confusion and messes everything up. When very few people trying to capture the essence of a phenomena, so to speak) they end up with something really clever, like Plan9, or Scheme (or Arc) vi, Emacs, etc. So, there is a simple heuristic - as long as you saw piles upon piles of crap (J2EE, NodeJS, Clojure, everything that comes from MS or SAP) - just avoid it. "Perfection", as we know, is achieved not when it is nothing more to add, but when it is nothing more to remove.) This means, for instance, that we need less special forms (but moar small macros), less special characters (and using them consistently - I could write a brochure, about why using ~ instead of , in Clojure's macroses is not just a stupid break of consistency and familiarity, but also lack of taste - , "matches" with ` while ~ not.)) Most of the time, even a single glance at a text or source code is enough to form a correct intuition.