If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it. - Gerald M. Weinberg

The social science that provides us with the most useful overall model for computer programming is anthropology. With a little artistic license and stretching of the imagination, we could imagine computer programmers as having a culture — a shared set of beliefs and activities which shape their day-to-day activities.

the very first programmer, Lady Lovelace, seems to have had the idea of a programming language as a language as early as 1846. Although she was the niece of Lord Byron, it was not her knowledge of poetry but, rather, of mathematics which led her to think of a symbolic system as a language — for the idea of mathematics as a language seems to go back into the misty ages of the past. Thus, the idea of “programming language” was really born with the idea of programming itself.

the job of programming can be fruitfully looked at from the point of view of testing alone — considering that the only real problem in programming is getting the program to work correctly and proving it.