> _I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. How programming helps you understand things that are usually written very poorly. No matter how good the authors are. It turns out that the traditional methods of writing these things are terrible._ > -Gerald Sussman > _My first application of programming was teaching electrical circuits to students. One thing I noticed was the way we teach students has very little to do with the way we do things ourselves._ > -Gerald Sussman > _The reason why I can talk to you and you can understand me at all is because we're almost identical. We're almost identical physically and we're almost identical in our experiences. As a consequence, it takes only a tiny increment of information to produce a big effect in transferring information, a piece of the data structure in my mind to a piece of the data structure in your mind._ > -Gerald Sussman > _And what happens is that mathematics has a shared culture, physicists have a shared culture, and they talk to each other in ways that depend upon the sharing of that culture. Trying to get an introductory student to understand that is very hard, because they have to simultaneously learn the culture and the language as well as the content. It's like trying to read Les Miserables while you're learning French grammar._ > -Gerald Sussman