Quickie: Edsger Dijkstra Excoriating Software Engineering
“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’.”
~ Edsger Dijkstra
NB. More profound Dijkstra quotes at Wikiquote.
Think Different
Like most disciplines computer programming suffers from “math and science envy.”
And with an amazing amount of advanced math, we’ve been able to …
– parse program source files more easily (regular expressions and grammars)
– be able to say “your program is really slow” with mathematical rigor (“order of” calculations)
I’m literally regularly playing games on a twitter channel dedicated to playing with advanced level computer science mathematics with things like … Oh, today, I see it’s “sheep” and “elephants.” Or “seedlings”, “trees”, and green and red apples. Oh; there’s one with rain and an umbrella. 🙄 There Is Serious MATH to this, I tell you!!!!!