Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of EE at MIT. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Sussman has had a number of important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, and with his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.
This presentation is a poignant realization of how we really don’t know how to compute, and my two favorite gems are, programs are not modifiable going forward and that the real problem in computing is the evolving and maintenance cost are becoming increasingly expensive.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute