Post #1772792

2026-04-28 05:11 UTC

&quot;Edger Dijkstra, one of the greatest computer scientists of our age and a spiritual descendant of Plato, has claimed that the development of the microprocessor has put computing back twenty-five years. His assertion is based on the view that the easy availability of computing power to people with no systematic training in good programming will lead to the wholesale abandonment of the standards and techniques painstakingly developed over the years by him and his colleagues; all the old mistakes will be repeated.&quot;

Replies (11)

@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 16:46

Maybe you'll enjoy the continuation onto the next page. I'm a both sides person here. I grew up on those magazines (and Basic). Anyway, this is from a book I've mentioned here before: The Creative Computer by Don Michie and Rory Johnston. Published in 1984 but relevant today.

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@tpfto@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 05:20

@dpiponi you know what, I sometimes wish Dijkstra was still alive just to see how he reacts to "vibe coding". ;D

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@tpfto@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 05:25

@dpiponi for people who want to read the entirety of Dijkstra's commentary: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD634.html

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@jjj@functional.cafe 2026-04-28 05:30

@dpiponi *Edsger

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@regtur@mastodon.social 2026-04-28 06:42

I never thought of Dijkstra as optimistic, but in hindsight 25 years was off by at least a factor of 2 (not uncommon in software) @janneke @dpiponi

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@au_hasard@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 07:02

@dpiponi which book is this?

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@paraw@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 07:05

@dpiponi I completely and wholeheartedly agree! And I believe the same holds for higher layers of abstraction. The preaching of Python to the masses, for example, made everyone believe they are good programmers, if not even good computer scientists. The result is that current researchers write scientific computing codes, such as for simulations, that run, on modern hardware, in a time that is a factor of 10 larger than what was needed 20 years ago for the same task, on the hardware available at the time.

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@DataKnightmare@mastodon.xyz 2026-04-28 07:34

@dpiponi great passage! what book is it?

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@pvdrijst@mastodon.social 2026-04-28 08:10

@dpiponi When you make no mistakes you will learn nothing, you're just a monkey tapping keys.

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@peterb@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-28 12:24

@dpiponi In all seriousness? This is Dijkstra at his worst and least useful.

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@obscurestar@mastodon.social 2026-04-28 16:03

@dpiponi But we didn't listen and now you have to have JavaScript on your resume, no matter how bad the language is, to say nothing of most of the slop made with it.

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