I had a chat with one of my friends about what makes us tick; and I found that whenever I write code, I think about individuals using it - and loving it. I think, I was like 5, when I watched my dad drawing a dog, a house, and some animated smoke coming out from the chimney on a computer. It was 20 years ago, and I have no idea how he did it. I remember looking at it, and loving it...

I think a lot of coders might have a main vision; and it's really useful to know consciously what it is, so you can chase after it harder.

Notation as a Tool of Thought ... Ken Iveson's (IvesEn, spell?) Touring Award Address

I think he was the third guy to get one.

it was all about how folks think in code

The transcript is here: http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

Iverson is probably best known for the APL family of languages (APL, J, K, A+, others), which use an extremely terse notation for bulk vector operations. Very interesting, though thus far I've just dabbled in J (http://www.jsoftware.com/).

Since you ask: Iverson. (And Turing.) And, as it happens, he got the 14th Turing award and was the 16th person to get one (because two earlier ones were shared).

They should update those mental modality books and put in programming.