The Prisoner Falls In Love With His

Aim For Brevity While Avoiding Jargon.

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.

There Is Very Little Point In Trying To Urge The World To Mend Its Ways As Long As That World Is Still Convinced That Its Ways Are Perfectly Adequate.

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".

Mentally Mutilated Potential Programmers Beyond Hope Of Regeneration.