Dijkstra lays the smack down on incompetent fools

[recursivelyenumerable]

When the science of chemistry eventually emerged, alchemy had already all but disappeared. Chemically speaking, there has been an intellectual interregnum, but I invite you to join me for a short while in the thought experiment of envisaging chemistry with alchemy still in existence. Needless to say, almost all the funding goes to the alchemists, who, in their effort to make gold from cheap base materials, at least attack a problem of the highest social relevance, viz. enable the government to finance its wars without inflicting poverty on the people. The chemists are derided because none of their work has contributed anything to the central problem of gold-making. When chemistry then makes assumptions about matter that would exclude gold-making, it is accused of being counterproductive, demoralizing, and harmful to the national interest. By the time chemistry accurately predicts the failure of alchemy’s next attempt, derision turns into open hostility, and, accused of wasting the taxpayer’s money, several state universities are forced to close down their chemistry departments. Well, I think that that is enough for our thought experiment: phantasy has already come too close to reality.

Well, we all know what happened. Chemistry is accepted as a science: we hate it for its pollution and our dependency on its products, but we no longer blame it for not trying to make gold. Medicine has been accepted as a science: we hate it for the overpopulation and the soaring medical bill but no longer blame it for not producing the Elixir that gives eternal youth. Astronomy has been accepted as a science; we hate it for removing the earth from the center of the universe but no longer blame it for not realizing the astrologer’s dream of accurate prediction of the future. They are accepted as sciences; at the same time, the flourishing business in Healing Gems and Crystals, the horoscopes in otherwise respectable magazines, and governments relying on astrologers are a healthy reminder that Science as such remains rejected and that the old dreams linger on. Finally, one general remark about how sciences emerge: sciences become respectable by confining themselves to the feasible and successful by allowing themselves to be opportunity-driven rather than mission-oriented. (This, by the way, is why managers hate successful science: because it is not mission-oriented, they cannot manage it.)

Let us now turn our attention to computing science. It is hated, of course, like any other science. In order to understand the specific distaste it evokes, and along with it all the pressures exerted on it, we should be aware of all the unrealistic dreams it failed to realize, for, unrealistic as they might be, the dreams linger on. The dreams have been so many, that I must restrict myself to the major ones.

Surely, our computers would unscramble all the secret code of all our enemies and guide our missiles with unfailing precision right on their targets. Robots would take over the tedium of production, guaranteeing a positive balance of trade for all nations. Office automation would multiply the productivity of the white-collar worker, information systems would enable management to avoid waste and to make the right strategic decisions, and finally, the giant brains would not only relieve us from the tedium but also from the obligation to think about hard problems and from the painful responsibility to take difficult decisions. In short: computers were tolerated because they promised a well protected and prosperous paradise for the lazy, the incompetent, and the cowardly.

Mathematical elegance, conceptual simplicity, and their companion, brevity of an unambiguous reference manual, are a condition sine qua non for any product reliable enough to attain stability.

Needless to say, this sober message is unacceptable. Simplicity requires hard work to be obtained and education for its appreciation, and complexity sells much better. I quickly learned this about twenty years ago when I presented orderly program design techniques for the first time in a foreign country. My audience was the personnel of a software house and, in my innocence, I expected for economic reasons this audience to be highly receptive for techniques for making flawless software. I gave a beautiful lecture, which fell flat on its face. The managers were horrified at the suggestion that flawless software should be delivered since company derived its stability from the subsequent maintenance contracts. The programmers were horrified too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite understanding what they were doing and their professional satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had first introduced in their daring irresponsibility. Teaching the competence to program boils down to the training of misfits.

man, these essays turn me on something fierce

[Van Cruncheon]

links to full articles plz

[recursivelyenumerable]

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1041.html

[Himu]

who?

[Van Cruncheon]

"famous" computer scientist, best known among cs students as "that bitter, unvalidated old fuck who came up with some kickass tree search algorithms"

that said, i do still find reducing nondeterministic finite automata to deterministic ones strangely satisfying, which also creeps me the fuck out

[Howard Alan Treesong]

what's the Pwn(n) of that essay?

[bluemax]

"famous" computer scientist, best known among cs students as "that bitter, unvalidated old fuck who came up with some kickass tree search algorithms"

that said, i do still find reducing nondeterministic finite automata to finite ones strangely satisfying, which also creeps me the fuck out

This first line is so so true.

[recursivelyenumerable]

How does he have access to a computer way back in 1641?

He didn't use computers.  He hand-wrote all his essays and photocopied them for distribution.   There are scans of the original hand-written versions online.
EWD1305

    *  And I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.

    [Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.]

    * It is not the business of computing science to promote "computerization", say by developing demanding applications so as to create a market for the next generation of hardware.

    [Medical researchers are not required to develop new diseases so as to create a market for more pharmaceutical products.]