Programming Is One Of The Most Difficult

I Think Of The Company Advertising "thought Processors" Or The College Pretending That Learning Basic Suffices Or At Least Helps, Whereas The Teaching Of Basic Should Be Rated As A Criminal Offence: It Mutilates The Mind Beyond Recovery.

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.

I Would Therefore Like To Posit That Computing's Central Challenge, How Not To Make A Mess Of It, Has Not Yet Been Met.

Please Don't Fall Into The Trap Of Believing That I Am Terribly Dogmatical About The Go To Statement. I Have The Uncomfortable Feeling That Others Are Making A Religion Out Of It, As If The Conceptual Problems Of Programming Could Be Solved By A Single Trick, By A Simple Form Of Coding Discipline!

...simplifications Have Had A Much Greater Long-range Scientific Impact Than Individual Feats Of Ingenuity. The Opportunity For Simplification Is Very Encouraging, Because In All Examples That Come To Mind The Simple And Elegant Systems Tend To Be Easier And Faster To Design And Get Right, More Efficient In Execution, And Much More Reliable Than The More Contrived Contraptions That Have To Be Debugged Into Some Degree Of Acceptability....simplicity And Elegance Are Unpopular Because They Require Hard Work And Discipline To Achieve And Education To Be Appreciated.