“We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.”

Cited in: Michael Jay Quinn (2006) Ethics for the information age. p. 415
The Psychology of Computer Programming, 1971

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activi…" by Gerald M. Weinberg?

Gerald M. Weinberg22

American computer scientist 1933–2018

Related quotes

“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 (1924–2007) American computer scientist

Quoted in the IBM employee magazine Think in 1979. Cited by his Associated Press obituary http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17704662/

“You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)] <br class="br">2010s

“The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little.html", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351 <br class="br">1980s

“But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

“I like the observation that Forth is an amplifier: a good programmer can write a great program; a bad programmer a terrible one. I feel no need to cater to bad programmers.”

Charles H. Moore

Quoted in Naomi Hamilton, "The A-Z of Programming Languages: Forth," http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;766897508 Computerworld (2008-06-27)

“The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 4. The Gene machine

“Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”

Bjarne Stroustrup book The C++ Programming Language

[Stroustrup, Bjarne, The C++ Programming Language, 693]

“Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems, 1966

“When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1970) " Notes On Structured Programming http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 6. <br class="br">1970s

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Gerald M. Weinberg22

Related quotes

Related topics