Hal Abelson Quotes
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Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
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Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
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Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.
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First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
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If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.
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Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.
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There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.
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A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes.
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[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.
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The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.
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What's important is not just to develop the technology; it's to develop the processes.
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Congress is good at doing two things: one is nothing, and the other is overreacting.