Post #4144290

Please heed Dijkstra's wisdom nearly 50 years after he spoke the words: "...after careful consideration I concluded that the intellectual challenge presented by the programming task is, indeed, as unprecedented as the high-speed automatic computer itself. And it had caused in my mind a shift of attention from "how to discover the unexpected" towards "how to avoid unmastered complexity", towards "how to reduce the demands made on our quantitatively limited powers of reasoning". "You must take my word for it, that past experience has made me a firm believer that this newer aspect of thinking, i.e. how to avoid unmastered complexity, can indeed be taught. ... Among other things it can be done by the identification and subsequent description of the more productive "complexity generators"." Those last two words keep looping around at the back of my mind every day now... and if you mine Dijkstra's secondary references, you'll find gold. The man was an expert at the very act of thinking, and he was well read to boot. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD480.html