Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.
Edsger DijkstraA most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
Edsger DijkstraIn this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".
Edsger DijkstraI would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.
Edsger Dijkstra