Heard an irritable pure math professor (an algebraist) shout that out a couple of times during a packed seminar given by a distinguished British AI expert. Seems he and everyone else in the math dept. was required or strongly encouraged to attend and he took exception. It was kind of embarrassing actually. It was almost as if we had an unhappy two-year-old in the room. Knowing how to write computer programs is a good thing. Plus it's fun.
Fortunately not all math professors have such a negative attitude.
Once Google engineer Peter Norvig, the author of the page linked in #15, was giving a talk at Stanford on Python, which is generally considered an unusually powerful programming language. An old professor named John McCarthy happened to wander in. When Norvig concluded his presentation and and asked for questions, McCarthy raised his hand and asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data. “No, John, it can’t,” responded Norvig.
In 1958, McCarthy, who passed on last October, invented Lisp, the most powerful computer language of them all. Lisp can gracefully manipulate Lisp code as data.