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Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)
- esafak 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU
- morphle 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEOZO1GwVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEOZO1GwVc
- pieterr 3y agohttps://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video-audio/NoorderlichtVideo.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video-audio/Noorderlicht...
- Jtsummers 3y ago> The management didn't want faultless programs because the company derived its stability from maintenance contracts. The bane of my existence. Companies like these get a decade long contract with governments and large enterprises (typically outside the "tech" space) to maintain a system, and at the end it's often worse than when they started the contract. Grifters, all of them. The worst offenders are the defense contractors. They know they don't have to work, sunk cost fallacy is strong in government contracting.
- NavinF 3y agoNot all defense contractors use cost-plus contracts
- Jtsummers 3y agoI have, unfortunately, seen this behavior and outcome with many types of government contracts, not just cost-plus. One of the worst had the contractor so deeply embedded in a program office the IG got involved as they were receiving incentive payments despite failing to meet contract requirements (despite several government people losing their positions, the contract was not lost even though fraud had almost certainly occurred). There are certainly some contractors who aren't as deep into the grifting, and a small handful who really are sincere, earnest, and successful, but they're a rare breed. The big contractors (Raytheon, LM, NG, Boeing) keep eating up the little ones, and the outcome is about what you'd expect from these conglomerates.
- sjburt 3y agoI had an employer that would do 10% margin on cost plus. Fixed price they would shoot for 300% or 400%, and if they were getting close to losing money they would start begging for more before delivery. They only time they really lost money is when they were trying to get into a new line of business and wanted to build heritage. If they ever needed to compete on price, they just wouldn’t. Usually their competitors wouldn’t either, there were only a few.
- rednab 3y agohttps://youtu.be/mLEOZO1GwVc?t=735 https://youtu.be/mLEOZO1GwVc?t=735 The Dutch language quote as displayed: "We mogen niet uit nonchalance fouten in een programma aanbrengen. Dat moeten we systematisch en met zorg doen.". Feel free to run that through your favorite translator. The subtitles: "We should not introduce errors through sloppiness but systematically keep them out." The translator missed a very dry and very Dijkstra joke.
- noirscape 3y agoAs a native dutch speaker here's how I would translate it: "We shouldn't add errors to software out of negligence. They should be added systematically and carefully."
- amelius 3y agoYes, and so always attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- jbverschoor 3y agoI’d translate it more like out of carelessness/arrogance
- vidarh 3y agoNonchalance is in English dictionaries.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoLiteral translation: “That must we systematically and with care do”.
- mp05 3y ago"We should not introduce errors into a program out of carelessness. We must do this systematically and with care." That's pretty funny, too bad.
- WhitneyLand 3y ago
- DrDroop 3y ago[flagged]
- DrDroop 3y ago[flagged]
- mp05 3y ago[flagged]
- DrDroop 3y ago[flagged]
- DrDroop 3y agoJust think at how backwards your comment is, basically you are telling me to shut up because you are a good boy who listens to his operations research professor in school who thinks that the only thing that matters for being validated as a human is having something named after you. Like does your professor have a foundational algorithm in computer science named after him? Does he? Why do you care what this smuck thinks, why should I care what you think. Dijkstra said some demonstrably invalid things about the process of software development and I am right about pointing that out without any reputation of degree to speak off.
- mp05 3y agoYou're completely off the rails pal.
- dang 3y agoBoth of you broke the site guidelines so badly in this thread that you crossed the line at which we'd ban an account. I'm not going to ban you now because your account has also posted good things, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, that would be good. Please particularly avoid tit-for-tat spats. They are never interesting to read, and they degrade discussion badly.
- mc32 3y ago>"The universities will continue to lack the courage to teach hard science, they will continue to misguide the students, and each next stage of infantilization of the curriculum will be hailed as educational progress." He was complaining of the watering down of curricula in Netherlander unis... He moved to TX in '84 due to the infantilization of students (by the Dutch). We now have some high school teachers who say they will not issue Ds and Fs and instead will give incompletes only... I'm afraid we have eclipsed the Dutch.
- NavinF 3y ago> they will not issue Ds and Fs and instead will give incompletes only Seems fine to me. Grades have always been totally arbitrarily. Just look at test scores instead
- mc32 3y agoSo why are they inflating As if grades don't matter and are arbitrary (I don't think they are). The A kid knows a whole lot more than the kid with Ds. Or put another way, for most knowledge economy jobs, I would prefer hiring unwatered straight A students over straight D students. If I needed burger flippers or landscapers, I probably would prefer straight D students --they just want to get their job done, few questions asked, and you let them bitch about the job and the economy. Does anyone here think China is going to water down their education and risk their competitiveness in hard sciences and maths?
- NavinF 3y agoI meant that grades have a low correlation with both general intelligence (g factor) and performance on specific jobs like software engineering. > why are they inflating As Because some people still think that grades matter > The A kid knows a whole lot more than the kid with Ds Sure but you can figure that out with just one leetcode question. After taking LC performance into account, there are ~0 bits of information left in grades
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- treprinum 3y agoEssentially, only write a program when you finished it completely in your mind already. Good luck with that beyond some Leetcode-sized problems.
- Icko 3y agoI feel you should be able to keep the high level idea in your head at once; of course not the details. I don't think I've ever completed a piece of code without having a scheme in my head, and where it should fit in it.
- TrackerFF 3y agoDunno, maybe it's some old-school thing from the days of punch cards? My first programming teacher was back in HS, some 25 years ago. The man was a retired software engineer in his 60s. He really pushed that train of thought - to "finish" the code in your mind, on paper, etc. before actually writing it and hitting compile / run. I never took it literally in the sense that you need to think out the entire program, but rather that when writing functions and more overall logic, it is good practice to have it all worked out - rather than just write as you go, and iterate. The latter part is very easy to do these days, as running code is more or less instant...
- jacquesm 3y agoThe edit-compile-test cycle in 1986 on a large mainframe was approximately 6 hours. A laser printer cut that down to 3.5 hours and that was enough to be able to do twice as much in a day. You can't imagine how surreal the difference was between my productivity at home on my micro computer vs what I got paid for. The only way to get anything done at all was to have the program more or less complete in your head otherwise you'd be busy for months on a simple problem. Exploratory programming? Forget about it...
- vsnf 3y agoMy father, a programmer who got his start in the punch card era, was the same way, but I never had the mental capacity for this. I need to start writing before I can concretely hold anything in my mind. The structure of the program, and the output feedback loop into themselves and emerge more or less simultaneously.
- vlowrian 3y agoDijkstra died of cancer in 2002, about 2 years after this recording.
- lp4vn 3y agoAfter almost 10 years working in corporations and in the government, I can't help but think that Dijkstra's call for quality rings truer than ever. It's appaling the amount of projects that get killed not only because they were poorly executed but also because they were completely useless in the first place. In this day and age we live in a kind of stupor that we have to keep the wheel of economy spinning no matter what and that as long as someone is paying we have to keep sh*tting lines of code for perpetually late projects. It's like we're inefficient on purpose. Look at the shitshow that the SCRUM method is for instance. We are purposefully distancing software development from any kind of rigorous method, it's a real tragedy.
- shiandow 3y agoNo amount of mathematics is going to prevent you from making something nobody needs. It will work beautifully though.
- usgroup 3y agoAh good, because the sort of rubbish I suspect OP is referring to also usually contains "no amount" of mathematics too :)
- shiandow 3y agoAs a mathematician I'd point out that 'None' is also an amount ;-)
- usgroup 3y agoPedantry on my part, but would you say that a non-existent unicorn weigh some amount "None"? That'd be strange to me, and "no amount" would describe such a situation.
- shiandow 3y agoThat hypothetical has very little to do with the situation at hand. Badd software clearly exists and it is possible to talk about how much mathematics went in it. If no mathematics went in that's still an inidication of 'how much' and therefore is an amount.
- pythonguython 3y agoWriting complete and correct code takes a lot of engineering time and money. The aerospace industry does it and the price tag matches. Imagine how much innovation we would have missed out on if we demanded perfection from every product over the last 60 years
- Jtsummers 3y agoThe aerospace industry does not write complete and correct code. Hate to terrify you, but it's true. Some companies do, some specific areas do. Most are just a step or two above the software industry average in terms of quality, which is not that stellar. They don't get there by using a lot of formal methods or thinking deeply. They get there by testing the shit out of everything and static analysis tools (which have gotten a ton better since I started in the industry). Some of the programmers I've had to clean up after were mediocre, at best (though others were stellar). The main reason their systems don't kill people is the testers standing between you and their original code. MBSE has been picking up, and it's a good thing. It's not as big as it should be or always used effectively, but it's helping.
- fransje26 3y ago> Imagine how much innovation we would have missed out on if we demanded perfection from every product over the last 60 years Very ironic to have such a take when the very industry brought up is arguably the one that brought the most innovation of the post-war era. From metal alloys to electronics, plastics, composits, wireless transmission, precision machining, quality standards and traceability.
- pythonguython 3y agoI don’t consider it ironic. My opinion is that both fast paced development and careful rigorous development can produce innovation, but often of a different kind. You can have both and they don’t have to negate each other. The development pace at companies like Google have contributed to changing the world just like NASA has
- zubairq 3y agoThe more I read about Dijkstra the more interesting he gets!
- noitanec 3y ago> Program testing can convincingly show the presence of bugs, but it hopelessly inadequate to show their absence.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's where formal verification comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
- sebstefan 3y agoThe way he talks is very like himself :') Alan Kay said it best "I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."
- pncnmnp 3y agoHey everyone, I wrote this blog-post. I kinda wanna share another story about Dijkstra that I've always found interesting: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/memorial/newsletterarticle.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/memorial/newsletterartic... > The courses that Edsger taught regularly all had the title Capita Selecta (selected topics). Prior to his retirement in 1999, the offering alternated each semester between the graduate and undergraduate level. Taking Edsger’s course was an intimate experience and a unique learning opportunity. The class enrollment was limited to 20 or so students, which allowed a rewarding level of interaction between instructor and students. The main form of assessment in his course (in addition to the informal impressions he formed throughout the semester) was a two-hour oral examination, held either in his office or at his home. During this individual session, Professor Dijkstra would present the (usually nervous) student with a problem or two. The student’s task was to develop a satisfactory argument during the allotted time, writing the solution on the blackboard. Afterward, the student would generally leave the room with a warm glow of accomplishment thanks to Edsger’s gentle prodding and questioning during the session. I was wondering if anyone on HN took his course and could share their experience?
- oluckyman 3y agoI was a visiting professor there in 1989, and sat in on the course, which was on math proofs. We had weekly homework, which I did. In one class, I told Dijkstra that his proof was wrong. He couldn’t see my point, and we argued briefly and agreed to disagree. It was the only time anyone spoke up in class without being asked to by Dijkstra. At the start of the next class, Dijkstra announced that his attempted proof was indeed wrong, and proceeded to give a revised proof. Everyone was impressed by his intellectual honesty. He wrote up the episode as EWD 1044 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1044.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E... Dijkstra asked me to sit in on one final oral exam which he was expecting to be tricky. It was a very intimidating atmosphere for the student.
- o2l 3y agoThank you so much for this! I came across this interview a few days ago and loved it so much that I was going to transcribe it myself. <3