Programming was for everyone, he insisted, not just the science and engineering majors. It was a fundamental intellectual skill, like mathematics or English composition. The point of his course was not merely to teach students how to write in Fortran or Algol, Perlis maintained, but also to teach them how to think about processes of all kinds—how to describe them, how to analyze them, and how to build up complex processes out of simpler ones.
Programming was for everyone!
