#EdsgerDijkstra “The Humble Programmer”
“He argues that #programming is the only activity in which humans have to master nine orders of magnitude of difference between the lowest level of detail, and the highest.“ — #CodeComplete #SteveMcConnell, page 771.
» The only effective way to raise the confidence level of a program significantly is to give a convincing proof of its correctness.
But one should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmer’s burden... «
Full #ACM #Turing Lecture 1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dGXRK8FUVg
Full #EWD340 text
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html
#Dijkstra #CompSci #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience #HumbleProgrammer
@mastobit
Many punch bits
» The sooner we can forget that FORTRAN has ever existed, the better «
» human limitations may strike you as a rather depressing view of our predicament, but I don’t feel it that way, on the contrary! The best way to learn to live with our limitations is to know them «
» Increased power of the hardware, together with the perhaps even more dramatic increase in its reliability, made solutions feasible that the programmer had not dared to dream about a few years before«
Mast0b1t
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