Aim For Brevity While Avoiding Jargon.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

Are You Quite Sure That All Those Bells And Whistles, All Those Wonderful Facilities Of Your So Called Powerful Programming Languages, Belong To The Solution Set Rather Than The Problem Set?

The Use Of Anthropomorphic Terminology Forces You Linguistically To Adopt An Operational View. And It Makes It Practically Impossible To Argue About Programs Independently Of Their Being Executed.

Lisp Has Jokingly Been Described As "the Most Intelligent Way To Misuse A Computer." I Think That Description Is A Great Compliment Because It Transmits The Full Flavour Of Liberation: It Has Assisted A Number Of Our Most Gifted Fellow Humans In Thinking Previously Impossible Thoughts.

Much Of The Excitement We Get Out Of Our Work Is That We Don't Really Know What We Are Doing.