When you’re working on language design, I think it’s good to have such a target and to keep it consciously in mind. When you learn to drive, one of the principles they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by aiming at some point in the distance. Even if all you care about is what happens in the next ten feet, this is the right answer. I think we should do the same thing with programming languages.

Paul Graham, Hackers & painters: Big ideas from the computer age, Cambridge, 2004, p. 182