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I don't think Dijkstra denies the possibility of "A picture is worth a thousand words". He just says that the opposite is certainly true, and warns against the
by jonsen 11y ago
I don't think Dijkstra denies the possibility of "A picture is worth a thousand words". He just says that the opposite is certainly true, and warns against the habit of relying on pictures.
- Someone 11y agoNot quite. He opposed words, too. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1239.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...: "But in order to reason effectively, the very least we should be able to do is establishing whether two statements mean the same thing or whether two definitions are equivalent, and here we immediately run into trouble with our so-called “natural languages”, which (among other shortcomings) are not very well suited to precision" So, prose isn't his optimal way op communication, either. Further on, he wrote: "A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures." The problem Dijkstra had with pictures is, that there is no way to show that you have considered all their variants without the use of logic. Also, logic alone is sufficient. So, why bother drawing pictures that may give rise to false intuitions?