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It's important to ask "Compared to what?" The Fortran prominent in that era was a mess of unmaintainable spaghetti code. Structured programming is generally a m
by dreamcompiler 7y ago
It's important to ask "Compared to what?" The Fortran prominent in that era was a mess of unmaintainable spaghetti code. Structured programming is generally a much better programming paradigm compared to spaghetti Fortran and that was Dijkstra's point.
Just because Hindley-Milner cannot catch all possible type-related problems, that doesn't make it a bad idea. Likewise structured programming cannot replace all uses of goto, but it would be ridiculous to go back to spaghetti code as the default setting.
- OliverJones 7y agoExactly right. "Compared to what?", I had a really cool internship fifty years ago (when I was sixteen.) The group was doing pioneering electrocardiogram recognition (now the commomplace monitor beep beep beep). We had a bunch of scary-smart M.D.-Ph.D doctors figuring things out. And I got to try to make sense of all their code and make it work together. I remember putting copies of Dijkstra's Damation article all over the place so those guys would read it. They did read it. They liked it. They talked about it. And then they started to be able to debug their stuff and get it working together.