📖The Humble Programmer

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One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!

Hardware used to be more respectable than software.

First electronic computers were all unique, single-copy machines

q → Programming used to be perceived as a second-class intellectual activity

the programmer himself had a very modest view of his own work: his work derived all its significance from the existence of that wonderful machine. Because that was a unique machine, he knew only too well that his programs had only local significance and also, because it was patently obvious that this machine would have a limited lifetime, he knew that very little of his work would have a lasting value.

Programming used to be a lot about optimizing the code and squeezing it into the constraints of the machine. A common thought was that with more powerful machines, the constraints will be lifted and programming will no longer be an issue. However, this is not what happened.

• Ambition rose with the rise of computing power

• Computers became more complicated to program

• “third-generation” computers meant cheap hardware, and it was badly designed for programming. That design stayed with us. However, many think that that’s how things have to be

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Those who want really reliable software will discover that they must find means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with, and as a result the programming process will become cheaper. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

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We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.

programming language shapes what thoughts we can think