The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new… - Paul Graham

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn’t, that probably doesn’t make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn’t, that’s not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

Founders often wonder whether they should raise money from investors. The answer to that one is surprisingly simple. You should raise money if and only if you (a) need money and (b) are currently appealing enough to get it.