> Printed in "Classics in Software Engineering" by Yourdon Press, 1979 It's interesting how terminology has changed. In the 1970s you might have been able to s

> Printed in "Classics in Software Engineering" by Yourdon Press, 1979 It's interesting how terminology has changed. In the 1970s you might have been able to say that Dijkstra was part of a field called "software engineering", in that he was writing about methodology for developing software. But in the 1980s it became a fairly different field, focused more on how to develop effective processes for large-scale development (modeling, testing, code review, team structure, tooling, etc.). By 1988 Dijkstra was vehemently against that version of software engineering. Here's his article on that subject: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036... A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".