Programming philosophy is an interesting thing, and I don't think it's just a dichotomy. Wirth does have some things in common with the Bell Labs crowd and does

Programming philosophy is an interesting thing, and I don't think it's just a dichotomy. Wirth does have some things in common with the Bell Labs crowd and doesn't quite fit in the same niche as Dijkstra-esque Ivory Tower designs or very sound and secure computational mega-structures. Not a fan of functional programming, for one. I think one quality of software engineering he would disagree is the "move fast and add things" we're so enamored of. Nothing is every removed and because everything is treated like a product, you have to add new features to "sell" something, including programming languages. The "straight jacket" comment is interesting. I remember reading the "jargon file" that came with my slackware CD in the 90s and being quite pumped about the "punk" nature of the Unix crowd opposing "bondage and discipline" languages. A few years later, the same crowd of people forbids tabs in their C-clone or even has official formatting rules enforced via mandatory pretty printing.