There is a missing characteristic to most of what is published today on the subject of computing. At some point in time, as a matter of course, we stopped treating the subject with respect and reverence, and we started adorning it with buzzwords, marketing promises and metaphors borrowed from the self-help department.

What Daniel D. McCracken managed to accomplish as early as 1957 was to give the knowledgeable layperson a foundation for understanding business processes in terms of procedural mathematics. As a young author decades ago, I studied McCracken’s methods and I attempted to take his lessons to heart. In some of my first books on Visual Basic, I was inspired by McCracken to demonstrate a relatively simple concept using a substantively more complex tool: I demonstrated program control using sort algorithms.