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Cover Quote: August 2014
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People seem to equate programming with coding, and that’s a problem. Before you code, you should understand what you’re doing. If you don’t write down what you’re doing, you don’t know whether you understand it, and you probably don’t if the first thing you write down is code. If you’re trying to build a bridge or house without a blueprint—what we call a specification—it’s not going to be very pretty or reliable. That’s how most code is written. Every time you’ve cursed your computer, you’re cursing someone who wrote a program without thinking about it in advance. There’s something about the culture of software that has impeded the use of specification. We have a wonderful way of describing things precisely that’s been developed over the last couple of millennia, called mathematics. I think that’s what we should be using as a way of thinking about what we build.
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- Leslie Lamport
Three Questions for Leslie Lamport, Winner of Computing’s Top Prize, 2014
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