It's not that mathematics does not have its uses as a tool. However, there is a big difference between pragmatists like Lamport and Knuth, who used their mathem

It's not that mathematics does not have its uses as a tool. However, there is a big difference between pragmatists like Lamport and Knuth, who used their mathematical knowledge in the service of engineering projects, like building their own text processing system, and dogmatists like Dijkstra, who relied on underlings to type up his handwritten papers so he would not have to sully his hands by touching an actual computer. Granted, Dijkstra did make some contributions to CS, but he also caused immense damage to CS education by promoting his vision of CS as exclusively a branch of applied mathematics, instead of an engineering discipline employing mathematics as one of several tools. That mentality has led to much preaching about constructing programs using top-to-bottom formal methods, and very few useful programs constructed that way.