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"The Royal Surgical Society even issued a strongly worded Manifesto..." "the Department of Defence declared a moratorium on all funding of sterilization resear

"The Royal Surgical Society even issued a strongly worded Manifesto..." "the Department of Defence declared a moratorium on all funding of sterilization research..." I can find no evidence that such a manifesto ever existed or that the DoD ever took such an action. When I search for these, the top link is this essay. I know there was resistance to sterilization, but I suspect Dijkstra may have been exaggerating it to make his point.

StefanKarpinski 9y ago
It was unclear to me when reading this if this was meant to be a true history or an allegory for something that was actually happening in the science world at the time – as in "imagine if the scientific world had reacted to surgical sterilization the way we're reacting to X right now." But there's no context here as to what X might be if that's what he intended.
Jtsummers 9y ago
Definitely an exaggeration. This EWD is meant to satirize the position of people who argue against certain development approaches that might yield higher quality software by comparing them to the fools (who actually did exist) that argued against sterilization. And then he takes it further. Ironically, of course, the DoD did fund the research and development of several programming languages and tools that would have offered precisely the hygiene Dijkstra would like to see in software development. Specifically I'm referring to Ada. Which was rejected by the industry (for various reasons, some legit and some not).
- Ace17 9y ago
  > the DoD did fund the research and development of several programming languages and tools that would have offered precisely the hygiene Dijkstra would like to see in software development. No tool will force you to wash your hands. Hygiene is a matter of knowledge, and discipline ; and it's mostly unrelated to the tools you're using.
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    But tools make it easier. I can write damned fine assembly code. But if you give me a language and tools that can ensure the guarantees I've tried to compute by hand I can get much better results, much faster, and get much more done.
    - Ace17 9y ago
      "What killed Smalltalk? it was just too easy to make a mess" (Ward Cunningham) The power of your tools is an orthogonal issue. It isn't related to the discipline and cleanliness issue: for example, dynamic typing allows you to make design miracles, as well as stinking piles of obscure-broken-beyond-repair code. Actually, a lot of powerful tools have this double-edged sword quality: dynamic typing. C++ templates. shared_ptr/garbage collection. inheritancy. lambdas/closures. "eval". monkey patching. tests (!). Sure, tools like Coq or even Rust's static type system will provide, at compile time, extra guarantees that your code will work as intended. However, they won't provide guarantees that your program will be easy to maintain/modify. Actually, if misused, they could have the opposite effect (i.e as soon as you try modifying the smallest bit of code, compilation/checking fails with unhelpful error messages). Don't get me wrong: good tools are important, and nobody's going to make me write a webserver in assembly language, or a NES emulator in PHP! However, in my experience, their impact on code maintainability is negligible in front the impact of the developper herself. Ultimately, it all hinges on who's writing the code.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    Uhm, this is wrong. Checklists. You can cheat the checklist, but it makes washing your hands a matter of following known procedures, not knowledge and discipline. Like, airlines cut down on pilot errors through checklists and improving procedures, not by making pilots more knowledgable and disciplined.
    - gbacon 9y ago
      A checklist is a mere piece of paper without the discipline to use it every time.
fcatalan 9y ago
Reads to me as an allegory very loosely based on the very real and sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
uniformlyrandom 9y ago
He is obviously being facetious. You can tell by the time you reach the paragraph about nurses; it goes too dark even for medicine history. I assume surgeons = programmers, nurses = QA. No idea what the other fictional entities map to though.

StefanKarpinski 9y ago

It was unclear to me when reading this if this was meant to be a true history or an allegory for something that was actually happening in the science world at the time – as in "imagine if the scientific world had reacted to surgical sterilization the way we're reacting to X right now." But there's no context here as to what X might be if that's what he intended.

Jtsummers 9y ago

Definitely an exaggeration. This EWD is meant to satirize the position of people who argue against certain development approaches that might yield higher quality software by comparing them to the fools (who actually did exist) that argued against sterilization. And then he takes it further. Ironically, of course, the DoD did fund the research and development of several programming languages and tools that would have offered precisely the hygiene Dijkstra would like to see in software development. Specifically I'm referring to Ada. Which was rejected by the industry (for various reasons, some legit and some not).

Ace17 9y ago
> the DoD did fund the research and development of several programming languages and tools that would have offered precisely the hygiene Dijkstra would like to see in software development. No tool will force you to wash your hands. Hygiene is a matter of knowledge, and discipline ; and it's mostly unrelated to the tools you're using.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  But tools make it easier. I can write damned fine assembly code. But if you give me a language and tools that can ensure the guarantees I've tried to compute by hand I can get much better results, much faster, and get much more done.
  - Ace17 9y ago
    "What killed Smalltalk? it was just too easy to make a mess" (Ward Cunningham) The power of your tools is an orthogonal issue. It isn't related to the discipline and cleanliness issue: for example, dynamic typing allows you to make design miracles, as well as stinking piles of obscure-broken-beyond-repair code. Actually, a lot of powerful tools have this double-edged sword quality: dynamic typing. C++ templates. shared_ptr/garbage collection. inheritancy. lambdas/closures. "eval". monkey patching. tests (!). Sure, tools like Coq or even Rust's static type system will provide, at compile time, extra guarantees that your code will work as intended. However, they won't provide guarantees that your program will be easy to maintain/modify. Actually, if misused, they could have the opposite effect (i.e as soon as you try modifying the smallest bit of code, compilation/checking fails with unhelpful error messages). Don't get me wrong: good tools are important, and nobody's going to make me write a webserver in assembly language, or a NES emulator in PHP! However, in my experience, their impact on code maintainability is negligible in front the impact of the developper herself. Ultimately, it all hinges on who's writing the code.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Uhm, this is wrong. Checklists. You can cheat the checklist, but it makes washing your hands a matter of following known procedures, not knowledge and discipline. Like, airlines cut down on pilot errors through checklists and improving procedures, not by making pilots more knowledgable and disciplined.
  - gbacon 9y ago
    A checklist is a mere piece of paper without the discipline to use it every time.

fcatalan 9y ago

Reads to me as an allegory very loosely based on the very real and sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

uniformlyrandom 9y ago

He is obviously being facetious. You can tell by the time you reach the paragraph about nurses; it goes too dark even for medicine history. I assume surgeons = programmers, nurses = QA. No idea what the other fictional entities map to though.