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Harold Abelson

Harold 'Hal' Abelson, Ph.D., is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a fellow of the IEEE, and a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.


“Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.”
Harold Abelson
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“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
Harold Abelson
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