"This story is true, and the conclusion too, except that it was Von Neumann, not Turing, deriding such a tool as a waste of computer time for clerical work.
Turing, in stark contrast to Von Neumann[1], understood very well the benefits of using the computer to work at higher level abstractions. In his lecture to the London Mathematical Society about his Automatic Computing Engine[2], Turing sketches out computers not just assembling programs themselves but actually deriving the programs themselves.
Your disagreement here is with Von Neumann, not Turing. Turing would have been on your side."
A very useful comment, that. I've added an update to the bottom of the post. I'd always found the assembler story surprising give Turing's history of mechanising drudge work (the bombes, for instance) and now I know why.
"This story is true, and the conclusion too, except that it was Von Neumann, not Turing, deriding such a tool as a waste of computer time for clerical work.
Turing, in stark contrast to Von Neumann[1], understood very well the benefits of using the computer to work at higher level abstractions. In his lecture to the London Mathematical Society about his Automatic Computing Engine[2], Turing sketches out computers not just assembling programs themselves but actually deriving the programs themselves.
Your disagreement here is with Von Neumann, not Turing. Turing would have been on your side."
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=von+neumann+clerical+work [2] www.vordenker.de/downloads/turing-vorlesung.pdf