9 Quotes by Hal Abelson

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

There’s a good part of Computer Science that’s like magic. Unfortunately there’s a bad part of Computer Science that’s like religion.

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.

What’s important is not just to develop the technology; it’s to develop the processes.

Congress is good at doing two things: one is nothing, and the other is overreacting.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.