3 ms·

A quote by somebody who is not an astronomer, clearly (she said, while in the other workspace watching data originating gazillion of miles away taken by an inst

by frossie 16y ago

A quote by somebody who is not an astronomer, clearly (she said, while in the other workspace watching data originating gazillion of miles away taken by an instrument that works only because of obscure quantum effects). :-P Seriously, I think starting to think your discipline is somehow superior to others is an open door to complacency. I think what I do is pretty cool, but what a lot of people do is pretty cool. Not sure why I would try to outdo a neurosurgeon ("gee, you are only working to a 10^6 dynamic scale").

_grrr 16y ago
Outdoing a neurosurgeon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
nandemo 16y ago
I agree with you, but Dijkstra would too. He never claimed that computer science or software engineering (remember that there was no clear distinction back then) were somehow superior to other disciplines. On the contrary, in many of his writings he is lamenting the state of our profession. The quote on the blog is somewhat out of context, and it reminds me of this: The major cause [of the software crisis] is... that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products. To put it in another way: as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society's ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. The increased power of the hardware, together with the perhaps even more dramatic increase in its reliability, made solutions feasible that the programmer had not dared to dream about a few years before. And now, a few years later, he had to dream about them and, even worse, he had to transform such dreams into reality! Is it a wonder that we found ourselves in a software crisis? No, certainly not, and as you may guess, it was even predicted well in advance; but the trouble with minor prophets, of course, is that it is only five years later that you really know that they had been right. -- E. W. Dijkstra http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD...
- helmut_hed 16y ago
  Great comment. I think what people are missing here is that Dijkstra regards this difference as a bad thing, one that we are not capable of handling! It's not something to be proud of at all.
- shasta 16y ago
  Dijkstra (eventually at least) distinguished between computer science and software engineering, about which he wrote disparaging things.

by frossie 16y ago

_grrr 16y ago

Outdoing a neurosurgeon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

nandemo 16y ago

I agree with you, but Dijkstra would too. He never claimed that computer science or software engineering (remember that there was no clear distinction back then) were somehow superior to other disciplines. On the contrary, in many of his writings he is lamenting the state of our profession. The quote on the blog is somewhat out of context, and it reminds me of this: The major cause [of the software crisis] is... that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products. To put it in another way: as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society's ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. The increased power of the hardware, together with the perhaps even more dramatic increase in its reliability, made solutions feasible that the programmer had not dared to dream about a few years before. And now, a few years later, he had to dream about them and, even worse, he had to transform such dreams into reality! Is it a wonder that we found ourselves in a software crisis? No, certainly not, and as you may guess, it was even predicted well in advance; but the trouble with minor prophets, of course, is that it is only five years later that you really know that they had been right. -- E. W. Dijkstra http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD...

helmut_hed 16y ago
Great comment. I think what people are missing here is that Dijkstra regards this difference as a bad thing, one that we are not capable of handling! It's not something to be proud of at all.
shasta 16y ago
Dijkstra (eventually at least) distinguished between computer science and software engineering, about which he wrote disparaging things.