Anuerin Diaz posted an interesting link to PLUG:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

Reminds me of open source.

More very interesting stuff in the article.

Incidentally, Paul Graham is a LISP guy. =)