Mentally Mutilated Potential Programmers Beyond Hope Of

Apl Is A Mistake, Carried Through To Perfection.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

We Are All Shaped By The Tools We Use, In Particular: The Formalisms We Use Shape Our Thinking Habits, For Better Or For Worse, And That Means That We Have To Be Very Careful In The Choice Of What We Learn And Teach, For Unlearning Is Not Really Possible.

If There Is One 'scientific' Discovery I Am Proud Of, It Is The Discovery Of The Habit Of Writing Without Publication In Mind.

It Used To Be The Program's Purpose To Instruct Our Computers; It Became The Computer's Purpose To Execute Our Programs.