Dijkstra’s general senitment seems to be that applying existed engineering practices from civil, mechanical, electrical, etc. engineering disciplines to computer science is woefully inadequate. With this, I agree. I also agree that there seems to be some weird set of beliefs in mathematical culture that the human brain is superior to a computer and that no computer could ever do mathematics like a human could (I’ve seen even prominent mathematicians use Godel’s theorem as bogus ‘evidence’ of this).
But the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative to the status quo of software engineering, not at the moment. The only type of radical new thinking that I am aware of is the functional programming approach to things taken by e.g. haskell. But there are a lot of issues there as well. So far, productivity has been far higher using the more traditional way of doing things.
Dijkstra’s general senitment seems to be that applying existed engineering practices from civil, mechanical, electrical, etc. engineering disciplines to computer science is woefully inadequate. With this, I agree. I also agree that there seems to be some weird set of beliefs in mathematical culture that the human brain is superior to a computer and that no computer could ever do mathematics like a human could (I’ve seen even prominent mathematicians use Godel’s theorem as bogus ‘evidence’ of this).
But the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative to the status quo of software engineering, not at the moment. The only type of radical new thinking that I am aware of is the functional programming approach to things taken by e.g. haskell. But there are a lot of issues there as well. So far, productivity has been far higher using the more traditional way of doing things.