Autcsrgv.336 net.followup utzoo!utcsrgv!donald Sun May 9 16:22:51 1982 Dijkstra flames It's interesting to observe the napalm that is being thrown back and forth over Dijkstra's seven-year-old (!) remarks. He seems to have touched a sore nerve in those self-made "nonmathematical" programmers ("hacks"?) out there, who almost seem to boast of their lack of mathematics. I think that by "mathematics" (a word which inflames so many!) the Doctor does not mean differential calculus and trigonometry, but merely a formal system of reasoning. Programming today is a more or less ad hoc process. A programmer sits down and thinks, the wheels turn, and lo and behold, a programs spews out. As the the correctness of that program, God only knows. By making programming more "mathematical" I think he means formalizing the process so that we can reason about our programs, similar to the way in which a mathematician develops theorems. To you people you consider your- selves "good" programmers, how often do you find yourself staring at compli- cated loop construct asking yourself "does this terminate? will this do exactly what I want it to do? will it handle special cases?" All too often we just take our code and run it a few times; if it doesn't bomb out, we consider it correct. A good programmer is not just someone who writes code at 1000 lines per hour which is nicely indented and readable and which seems to work O.K., he should also have developed his program in such a way that one can reason about it so that it can be shown that it actually DOES do what it's supposed to do. This may be hard to swallow for guys who program by the seat of the pants (which I admit I still do), but it's high time programming graduated from being an "art" to a "science". What would you think of a person engaged in designing a skyscaper who professed to be a "good engineer" but didn't know any mathematics beyond simple addition? Don Chan (utcsrgv!donald) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.