Sicp Quotes

“A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”
― Marvin Minsky

“Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?”
― Alan J Perlis

“What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“It is possible, indeed important, to be able to separate these two notions—to create procedures without naming them, and to give names to procedures that have already been created.”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs