Science Quote by Niklaus Wirth

A quiet provocation hides in Wirth's bland phrasing: "usually" is doing the work. He isn't praising examples so much as pointing to a default habit in programming education that can become a crutch. Wirth, a language designer who cared obsessively about structure (Pascal, Modula) and the discipline of reasoning, is hinting that we teach code the way we teach recipes: follow this pattern, get that output. It "works" because programming is concrete and immediate; an example compiles, runs, and delivers the small dopamine hit of success. The classroom loves that feedback loop.

The subtext is a warning about what gets lost. Examples are seductive precisely because they bypass the hard part: understanding the underlying model. Students can cargo-cult syntax, memorize idioms, and still be helpless when the problem shifts a few degrees. In Wirth's world, the point of learning a language is not to accumulate tricks but to internalize invariants: types, abstraction boundaries, data representation, proofs of correctness, costs. Examples can illustrate those ideas, but they can also smuggle in accidental complexity and make the incidental look essential.

Context matters: Wirth came out of an era when computing was moving from scarce, expensive machines to broader academic and professional use, and he argued for simplicity as an antidote to sprawling systems. Read that way, the line is less pedagogy tip than cultural critique: programming became popular faster than we learned how to teach thinking. Examples are the quickest on-ramp, but they can also produce a generation fluent in mimicry and shaky on first principles.