Good code has both substance and style. It provides all necessary information, without extraneous details. It is accurate, succinct and eloquent enough to be read and understood by humans. But by the late 1960s, advances in computing power had outpaced the abilities of programmers. Many computer scientists created programs without thought for design.

When she was an MIT undergraduate studying electrical engineering, Jeannette Wing '78, SM '79, PhD '83 took a required computer science class and began thinking about changing her major. But before making the decision, she called her father, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, to ask one big question: Is computer science just a fad? "I literally remember asking him that question," Wing said, drawing chuckles from an audience of MIT students and faculty. Wing's father assured her that computer science was here to stay. "So I switched," said Wing, who is herself now the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science at Columbia. "And I've never looked back."