Alan Turing — "Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from bo…"
Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
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Details
Widely attributed, likely from a lecture or informal comment.
Date: Unknown, likely 1940s-1950s
PhilosophicalVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: gemini
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Technical skills like programming develop through repetition and real-world exposure, not passive reading. You learn by writing actual code, debugging real problems, and studying how others solved similar challenges. Textbooks provide structure but cannot substitute for the intuition built through trial, error, and direct observation. The knowledge that sticks comes from wrestling with live problems, not memorizing abstract principles on a page.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing was a builder, not just a theorist. He designed the Bombe codebreaking machine at Bletchley Park, personally wrote programs for the Manchester Mark 1, and authored the ACE computer proposal at NPL through hands-on experimentation. He was largely self-taught in key areas and learned cryptanalysis by doing. His Turing Test is empirical rather than philosophical — his breakthroughs consistently came from tinkering, not classroom study.
The era
In the 1940s and early 1950s, computer science had no textbooks — the discipline was being invented in real time. At Bletchley Park and Manchester, programmers learned entirely by experimenting on actual hardware. No universities offered computing degrees and no curriculum existed. Knowledge spread through direct mentorship and examining colleagues' work, making Turing's observation less a bold claim than a straightforward description of the only method available to the field's pioneers.
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