Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

 

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.
--
Richard Stallman, Interview with Timothy Willis

 

Richard M. Stallman

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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

 

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.

 

Marvin Minsky

 

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

 

Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. [...] The proliferation of programming languages shows no more uniformity than mathematics. Nevertheless, programming languages do bring a different perspective. [...] Because of their application to a broad range of topics, their strict grammar, and their strict interpretation, programming languages can provide new insights into mathematical notation.

 

Kenneth E. Iverson

 

The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.

 

Edsger W. Dijkstra