(Disclosure: I was present on the Etherpad when this happened.)
Fave quote from the interview:
"If you want to do [some tricky thing related to grouping photos] the code looks really messy. It’s not rocket science, but it’s painful. Macros hide that pain really nicely. I actually enjoy grouping results. I have fun doing database-driven web programming. A lot of good things don’t get implemented on the web because they’re not fun."
I agree; his next answer really hits dead on for me: "power is about what becomes palatable to the programmer". This reminds me of the "conciseness conjecture" from On the expressive power of programming languages by Matthias Felleisen (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/felleisen90expressive.ht...). I offer the (sub-)conjecture that palatability and concision are correlated.
That was my favorite part of the interview too. It sort of flips around the issue of something being "hard". I.E. how can a language be built to make hard problems easier, as opposed to how to use a language to solve a hard problem.
Fave quote from the interview:
"If you want to do [some tricky thing related to grouping photos] the code looks really messy. It’s not rocket science, but it’s painful. Macros hide that pain really nicely. I actually enjoy grouping results. I have fun doing database-driven web programming. A lot of good things don’t get implemented on the web because they’re not fun."