“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"”

— Marvin Minsky

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. <br class="br">Turing Award Lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969) http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html, in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2) (April 1970)

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Marvin Minsky65

American cognitive scientist 1927–2016

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in Donald Knuth (1972). "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf. Comms. ACM. <br class="br">"Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

“Overemphasis of efficiency leads to an unfortunate circularity in design: for reasons of efficiency early programming languages reflected the characteristics of the early computers, and each generation of computers reflects the needs of the programming languages of the preceding generation.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

§5.4
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

“Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable. With their direct mapping to language, conceptual graphs can serve as an intermediate language for translating computer-oriented formalisms to and from natural languages. With their graphic representation, they can serve as a readable, but design and specification language.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual graphs for knowledge representation, 1993, p. 3-51. cited in: Bernhard Ganter, Gerd Stumme, Rudolf Wille (2005) Formal Concept Analysis: Foundations and Applications. p. 87

“The wonderful thing about dynamic typing is it lets you express anything that is computable. And type systems don’t — type systems are typically decidable, and they restrict you to a subset. People who favor static type systems say “it’s fine, it’s good enough; all the interesting programs you want to write will work as types”. But that’s ridiculous — once you have a type system, you don’t even know what interesting programs are there.”

Gilad Bracha American software engineer

Software Engineering Radio Episode 140: Newspeak and Pluggable Types with Gilad Bracha http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-types-with-gilad-bracha/

“The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs […] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

Source: Assigning Meanings to Programs http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/2007-615/reading/FloydMeaning.pdf (1967), pp. 19–20.

“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 Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

The Paradigms of Programming (1979)

“… greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

2003. Daddy, Are We There Yet? A Discussion with Alan Kay http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2003/04/03/alan_kay.html <br class="br">2000s

“The most general form of systems theory is a set of logical or mathematical statements about all conceptual systems. A subset of this concerns all concrete systems. A subsubset concerns the very special and very important living systems, i. e., general living systems theory.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living systems, 1978, p. 41

“For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

1978 Turing Award Citation https://web.archive.org/web/20070708004814/http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4173633&srt=all&aw=140&ao=AMTURING. <br class="br">About

“It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.”

Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) American philosopher

Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14

“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"”

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