The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.
The spread of liberal democracy and the integration of the world economy have created a situation in which the major powers are no longer willing to go to war with one another.