Dijkstra is one of my favorite writers on programming, but I can't resist pointing out that he was on the wrong side of "how to program if you cannot." We have

Dijkstra is one of my favorite writers on programming, but I can't resist pointing out that he was on the wrong side of "how to program if you cannot." We have a huge, thriving, valuable, and quite reliable information infrastructure built out of incorrect programs. Dijkstra believed in correct programs and believed that software engineering would not succeed without them. He believed it was counterproductive to teach people to program and employ them as programmers if they could not write correct programs. He believed that the future of computing would be defined by the struggle to write correct programs, and that even if we managed to get by with incorrect programs, the cost would be much greater than if we had achieved the same results via correct programs. Wow! Can you imagine where we would be if we only had code written by people who had completed rigorous training in mathematics and formal methods? Can you imagine a world where the middle ground between mathematics and the analog world was completely bare? No Excel spreadsheets made by accountants, no customized HTML or CSS, no wiki markup even, because you can't trust amateurs to do programming! It's hard to wrap my head around the idea that The Print Shop for the Apple II should never have existed, because the small minority of people suited for Dijkstra's rigorous training in mathematical programming would surely have been engaged on far more important projects. Hmm, the essay is dated 1988. I wonder if he still believed that a small class of elite programmers armed with formal methods would have created all of the wonderful programs I used at school around that time -- Print Shop, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Math Blaster, and on and on -- did he believe his mathematician/programmers would have created all those programs and even more? Or was he simply out of touch? Ah, but how wonderfully and brilliantly out of touch. He is also wrong about software aging and needing maintenance, as well, but there is an important lesson to learn from what he said. As usual, he is right about the mistake in language even though he is wrong about the phenomenon it refers to: programs are routinely transplanted from one context to another, because it is expensive or inconvenient to maintain their original context. Aging and maintenance are a poor analogy. Using poor language to address something is, in practice, less wrong than simply ignoring it, but we would be better off if we heeded Dijkstra's advice not to lean on bad analogies for novel situations.