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I had a chat with one of my friends about what makes us tick; and I found that whenever I write code, I think about individuals using it - and loving it. I think, I was like 5, when I watched my dad drawing a dog, a house, and some animated smoke coming out from the chimney on a computer. It was 20 years ago, and I have no idea how he did it. I remember looking at it, and loving it...

I think a lot of coders might have a main vision; and it's really useful to know consciously what it is, so you can chase after it harder.

Notation as a Tool of Thought ... Ken Iveson's (IvesEn, spell?) Touring Award Address

I think he was the third guy to get one.

it was all about how folks think in code

Since you ask: Iverson. (And Turing.) And, as it happens, he got the 14th Turing award and was the 16th person to get one (because two earlier ones were shared).

The transcript is here: http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

Iverson is probably best known for the APL family of languages (APL, J, K, A+, others), which use an extremely terse notation for bulk vector operations. Very interesting, though thus far I've just dabbled in J (http://www.jsoftware.com/).

They should update those mental modality books and put in programming.

Thinking by Coding