Hal Abelson Quotes

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.

[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.

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

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.

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.

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: 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.

What's important is not just to develop the technology; it's to develop the processes.