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Breaking news: our computing technology is not perfect, neither is our world He dismisses and complains about every piece of popular technology back then as if

by borplk 14y ago

Breaking news: our computing technology is not perfect, neither is our world He dismisses and complains about every piece of popular technology back then as if the world is about to collapse because hey! look, these apes invented COBOL and FORTRAN. What did he do? Did our world come to an end because how terrible COBOL was? No, we learned some lessons and we paid the price and now we're doing better, this is how it works. Every piece I read from Dijkstra it seems like he is having a hard time accepting the imperfect aspects of our computing technology. He wants the perfection of formal proofs to be everywhere in every program.

tluyben2 14y ago
He exaggerated his points because he did see the big picture which became reality; untrained people writing buggy, horrible software. He knew that would happen and tried to use his position to do something about it. And we are doing better? Computers were doing important things back then, but now they are almost driving our cars, they are flying our planes and giving us radiation therapy. All that, usually, without formal proof and with some kind of 'but we use unit tests so ...' attitude. Outsourced if possible because then it's cheap. Of course, humans make more mistakes than buggy software generally, however his point was that we have ways to almost prevent this by properly training software developers and writing proper software. You cannot prevent everything as he suggested (but, again, he exaggerated to make a point); you can make it better by not calling people who did some online course programmers and by creating open and robust systems. If you are young enough, I would be willing to bet that you will, at some time in your life be seriously hurt or even die from the consequence of not taking this seriously enough. You are probably losing money because of software bugs already; besides rounding errors, you (probably) have no idea how many bugs there are in the software which processes your insurance, taxes etc, all written in that evil Cobol by untrained monkeys. I know this for a fact in the Netherlands as I have seen this up close; probably true everywhere.
- borplk 14y ago
  Hmm...makes sense. I see your point and indeed I do agree. However, again, why didn't he do something practical about the perfect programming languages that he seems to talk about? Whatever technology you name, it is always possible to dismiss it by talking about another level of perfection, but what is it beyond imagination? We could perform our surgeries in this and that way... We could build our cities and buildings in this superior way...

by borplk 14y ago

tluyben2 14y ago

He exaggerated his points because he did see the big picture which became reality; untrained people writing buggy, horrible software. He knew that would happen and tried to use his position to do something about it. And we are doing better? Computers were doing important things back then, but now they are almost driving our cars, they are flying our planes and giving us radiation therapy. All that, usually, without formal proof and with some kind of 'but we use unit tests so ...' attitude. Outsourced if possible because then it's cheap. Of course, humans make more mistakes than buggy software generally, however his point was that we have ways to almost prevent this by properly training software developers and writing proper software. You cannot prevent everything as he suggested (but, again, he exaggerated to make a point); you can make it better by not calling people who did some online course programmers and by creating open and robust systems. If you are young enough, I would be willing to bet that you will, at some time in your life be seriously hurt or even die from the consequence of not taking this seriously enough. You are probably losing money because of software bugs already; besides rounding errors, you (probably) have no idea how many bugs there are in the software which processes your insurance, taxes etc, all written in that evil Cobol by untrained monkeys. I know this for a fact in the Netherlands as I have seen this up close; probably true everywhere.

borplk 14y ago
Hmm...makes sense. I see your point and indeed I do agree. However, again, why didn't he do something practical about the perfect programming languages that he seems to talk about? Whatever technology you name, it is always possible to dismiss it by talking about another level of perfection, but what is it beyond imagination? We could perform our surgeries in this and that way... We could build our cities and buildings in this superior way...