With ambition, you tend to get one step below what you aim for. So unless you try to be the best, you won't even be good. - Paul Graham

One of the most interesting (and also frightening) things about AI is how difficult it is to predict what will happen. My kids ask me what's going to happen, and all I can say is that there will be huge changes, and I can't predict what they'll be.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.

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.