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The part about us being teachers more than engineers or programmers jumped at me. I've long held the belief that code should be written far more for those readi
by aGHz 14y ago
The part about us being teachers more than engineers or programmers jumped at me. I've long held the belief that code should be written far more for those reading it than for the machine executing it. Your comment builds on that and made me think of this mantra: "The machine executing my code to produce an application is a side-effect. The main purpose of my code is to teach others how I control the machine into producing the application".
This, of course, holds in a setting where multiple people work together to build a sizeable codebase. There are many other settings where adopting this mantra would be counter-productive.
- gosub 14y ago"Our design of this introductory computer-science subject reflects two major concerns. 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. Second, we believe that the essential material to be addressed by a subject at this level is not the syntax of particular programming-language constructs, nor clever algorithms for computing particular functions efficiently, nor even the mathematical analysis of algorithms and the foundations of computing, but rather the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems." -- SICP From here http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html , second paragraph. The second part also responds to the original topic.
- aGHz 14y agoRight down my alley :) That's a long overdue reading for me. Thanks!