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Wikis are awesome. All they do is store text and allow it to be edited. It is the very fact that they don't have a structured model of ACLs and posts/comments/pages/votes/whatever else on top of them that make them flexible and useful, and allow projects like Wikipedia to come into being.

Shell scripting is awesome. All it does is allow you to run C programs that write to one another's IO streams, but with this, you can chain pre-made processes together in any way you wish, without having to compile a single new line of code.

Forth is awesome, Lisp is awesome, LEGO is awesome. (Can you see where I'm going with this?) The awe is not inspired by what the thing does on its own; the awe comes from what the thing enables you to do, and how simple the solution is that solves so many different problems.




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