Yet there’s often a tension between small, elegant jewels and sprawling, practical balls of mud. A small, perfect jewel is easy to understand and it doesn’t have warts but then you have to build more stuff on top of it to do anything. So everybody reimplements the same things over and over and that leads to a different kind of bloat and ugliness.
Peter Seibel (in Coders at Work, p. 101)
