Some Quotes on Computer Programming

Wed 26 Aug 2026

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing Lisp code lately. It’s been fun to open Emacs and tinker away with Elisp, I’ve been doing that on and off for about a year, and that has progressively sparked an interest in Common Lisp and I suppose Scheme now too.

Today I was curious about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) book because I had seen the first MIT lecture on YouTube a while back and then it became one of those things I tell myself I’ll get to later.

I made some time tonight to read the foreword and prefaces and I liked these quotes:

The source of the exhilaration associated with computer programming is the continual unfolding within the mind and on the computer of mechanisms expressed as programs and the explosion of perception they generate.

If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.