In The Good Old Days Physicists Repeated

Progress Is Possible Only If We Train Ourselves To Think About Programs Without Thinking Of Them As Pieces Of Executable Code.

So-called "natural Language" Is Wonderful For The Purposes It Was Created For, Such As To Be Rude In, To Tell Jokes In, To Cheat Or To Make Love In (and Theorists Of Literary Criticism Can Even Be Content-free In It), But It Is Hopelessly Inadequate When We Have To Deal Unambiguously With Situations Of Great Intricacy, Situations Which Unavoidably Arise In Such Activities As Legislation, Arbitration, Mathematics Or Programming.

The Purpose Of Abstraction Is Not To Be Vague, But To Create A New Semantic Level In Which One Can Be Absolutely Precise.

Brainpower Is By Far Our Scarcest Resource.

Beware Of "the Real World". A Speaker's Apeal To It Is Always An Invitation Not To Challenge His Tacit Assumptions.