Hal Abelson Quotes

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.