3 ms·

> If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"? Dijkstra would not h

> If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"? Dijkstra would not have liked this.

jgg 16y ago
:) Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP. I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though. EDIT: http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1213.html http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x... It appears that he liked functional languages... >The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages. but... >In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck! So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  Dijkstra is largely emblematic of the wing of Computing Science that seems to regard programming as déclassé
  - jgg 16y ago
    From his writing, I never got the feeling that Dijkstra himself hated programming, just that he hated most of the languages and ideas people used. Can you point to a particular essay that echoes this attitude, or is that just based on the (correct) observation that he was more a theorist, and they tend to scoff at the lowly programmer?
    - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
      Can't point to an essay myself, but I do remember an anecdote from somewhere that he did not actually own a computer until about six years before he died, and he only used it for websurfing.

> If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"? Dijkstra would not have liked this.

jgg 16y ago

:) Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP. I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though. EDIT: http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1213.html http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x... It appears that he liked functional languages... >The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages. but... >In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck! So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.

msbarnett 16y ago
Dijkstra is largely emblematic of the wing of Computing Science that seems to regard programming as déclassé
- jgg 16y ago
  From his writing, I never got the feeling that Dijkstra himself hated programming, just that he hated most of the languages and ideas people used. Can you point to a particular essay that echoes this attitude, or is that just based on the (correct) observation that he was more a theorist, and they tend to scoff at the lowly programmer?
  - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
    Can't point to an essay myself, but I do remember an anecdote from somewhere that he did not actually own a computer until about six years before he died, and he only used it for websurfing.