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> This school of thought that Dijkstra decried is the one that eventually triumphed in our industry ... The whole "languages are first for programmers to read,
by 0815test 7y ago
> This school of thought that Dijkstra decried is the one that eventually triumphed in our industry ... The whole "languages are first for programmers to read, and second for computers to run" shtick.
If that was the case, I think we'd just end up using literate programming systems, which get both the "human-focused" and "computer" parts right.
BTW, running executable code is only one small part of what computers do with programming languages; what about things like performing static analysis to detect errors within the code, and providing language-specific support for IDE's and/or CASE systems? These things just seem to be a lot more important in programming language design than either the "communicate to humans" or the "run executable code" part.
- the_af 7y agoI agree with you on all counts. I suppose I was thinking more of the Uncle Bob's and similar consultants' school of thought. If I dig deeper, it's not true that even this small subset has triumphed in the industry, either -- I know plenty of places where they don't even write tests. A few years ago, a software department in a major US-based oil company "discovered" unit testing and introduced it in a workshop as a big deal (note: they weren't practicing it, just talking about it, in its most bare-bones "hey, look this thing I found!" sort of way). In this context, literate programming is a pipe dream. I suppose I should amend my statement to: "this view has triumphed in the blogs, articles and papers that some programmers like to read, and self-styled gurus like to write, if not actually practice" :)