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Cover Quote: October 1970

I have so far skirted the field of software, or, as a friend of mine once said, “ad hoc-ery.” How few are the difficult ideas to grasp in the field! How much is merely piling on of detail after detail without any careful analysis! And when 50,000-word compilers are later remade with perhaps 5,000 words, how far from reasonable must have been the early ones! I feel that all too often we have been satisfied with such a low level of quality that we have done ourselves harm in the process. We seem not to be able to use the machine, which we all believe is a very powerful tool for manipulating and transforming information, to do our own tasks in this very field. We have compilers, assemblers, monitors, etc. for others, and yet when I examine what the typical software person does, I am often appalled at how little he uses the machine in his own work. A nonexpert, with a very long FORTRAN program to convert to local use, wrote a simple FORTRAN program to locate all the input-output statements and all the library references. In my experience, most programmers would have personally scanned long listings of the program to find them and with the usual human fallibility missed a couple the first time. I believe we need to convince the computer expert that the machine is his most powerful tool and that he should learn to use it rather than personally scan the long listings of symbols.



- Richard W. Hamming
1968 ACM Turing Lecture, 2003
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