Yquotes.com

 

In today's computer science curricula [...] almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design"–the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested–and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.
--
"Form and Content in Computer Science", 1969 Turing Award Lecture, Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2), April 1970

 

Marvin Minsky

» Marvin Minsky - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

 

Donald Knuth

 

However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don’t like any of them, and I don’t think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users).

 

Alan Kay

 

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.

 

Richard M. Stallman

 

If I ask another professor what he teaches in the introductory programming course, whether he answers proudly "Pascal" or diffidently "FORTRAN," I know that he is teaching a grammar, a set of semantic rules, and some finished algorithms, leaving the students to discover, on their own, some process of design.

 

Robert W Floyd

 

If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.

 

Robert W Floyd