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TLA+ creator Leslie Lamport: 'Programmers need abstractions'
Why it's crucial to think at a higher level than code before writing it.
A Microsoft web page(where he once worked as a research scientist) notes that Lamport began “dabbling” in computers in the 1950s — at a time when that meant “he and a friend used to scrounge around, looking for discarded vacuum tubes to build a digital circuit.” But staying true to his academic origins, Lamport once quipped that the language was a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers’ antipathy towards mathematics.” “They did the high-level design in TLA+,” Lamport says — before putting up an email he’d received from the head of their development team — that the TLA+ abstraction “helped a lot in coming to a much cleaner architecture.”
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