Dave Gauer’s essay on small programs and languages argues that short implementations can encourage curiosity by making a whole system seem understandable. It discusses tiny Forth and Lisp implementations and a short DOM-diffing library, while distinguishing compact code-golf programs from easy learning material. Forth, Lisp and Tcl combine small syntactic cores with expressive power but require a different way of thinking from familiar languages. Comprehensibility also depends on libraries, bundled documentation and useful error messages. Learners can study readable versions rather than decode the most compressed implementation.