The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independent programs, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existing ones.
--
"Beyond Programming Languages", in Artificial intelligence & software engineering (1991), ed. Derek Partridge, p. 317Terry Winograd
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A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.
Paul Graham
But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.
Niklaus Wirth
"Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
John Backus
The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. [...] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.
Alan Perlis
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
Maurice Wilkes
Winograd, Terry
Winslet, Kate
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