as software programs grow bigger and more complex, the code they comprise tends to become unreadable and incomprehensible to human beings. Programmers like to point out that if each line of code, or even each logical statement (which may spread to more than one physical line), is understood to be a component, software systems are the most complicated things that humans have ever built: the Lucent 5ESS switch, used in telephone exchanges, derives its functionality from a hundred million lines of code; the 2008 Fedora 9 distribution of Linux comprises over two hundred million lines of code. No temple, no cathedral has ever contained as many moving parts. So if you’ve ever written code, you understand in your bones the truth of Donald Knuth’s assertion, “Software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.” If you’ve ever written code, the fact that so much software works so much of the time can seem profoundly miraculous.
The programmer and popular blogger Steve Yegge, in his foreword to a book called The Joy of Clojure, describes the language as a “minor miracle” and “an astoundingly high-quality language … the best I’ve ever seen,” but he also notes that it is “fashionable,” and that
our industry, the global programming community, is fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass haute couture designers from New York to Paris ... Fashion dictates the programming languages people study in school, the languages employers hire for, the languages that get to be in books on shelves. A naive outsider might wonder if the quality of a language matters a little, just a teeny bit at least, but in the real world fashion trumps all.
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