Seibel: You also mentioned Knuth's TeX, which is obviously a much larger program. What is it that makes that program beautiful? Steele: He took a very, very complicated program with lots of special cases and reduced it to a single, very simple paradigm: sticking boxes and glue together. That was an immensely critical breakthrough. It turns out to be flexible not only for typesetting text but for all manner of other things as well that have to do with laying things out visually, two-dimensionally, on a page. I wish that more GUI interfaces were based on boxes and glue for laying out buttons and
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