I want to remind you of something simple: Programming and software engineering are not the same things. Neither is programming the same as algorithm design. We’ve tangled the several notions of programming—if we try we can unweave them, but sometimes we push on too quickly / get confused.

Richard P. Gabriel is known for his work related to the Lisp programming language (and especially Common Lisp) in computing. His best known work was a 1990 essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”, which incorporated the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of Lisp benchmarks (the “Gabriel Benchmarks”), published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems, which became a standard way of benchmarking Lisp implementations.