Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life

The original discussion started with XP/Agile and Kent Beck where you quite clearly had nothing to defend their achievements against Barry Boehm's whose works you seem to know nothing about. So instead you drag in Djikstra's works which are not under discussion here and somehow think that is valid? Also twisting my words to read non-existent meanings into them is merely a feeble attempt at trying to mask one's ignorance.

> you deprecated achievements like oberon as 'mere software'

This is a straight-up intentional misrepresentation of what was said. It was in response to your claim of Kent Beck's achievements and nothing whatever to do with Wirth's.

If that is what you understood then you need remedial English comprehension classes.

Also my other comment here for reference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907809

Merely to show the group of "the greats" in which i included Boehm. But we are not discussing his works here.

> i read all these process guys back in the 90s: boehm, yourdon, mills, weinberg, beck.

I too have read the works of these folks in the early 90s. Their work is all in different domains and not all of them "Process". Beck most certainly does not belong in this group. FYI, i was introduced to XP in 2000 at the company i worked for in Austin, Texas when they got Kent Beck himself to come in and teach us this new fangled concept called "Extreme Programming". I think i asked him about how he hoped to design and implement something like a OS with this "constant change" methodology; the answer was not satisfactory to say the least. Then of course the totally daft idea of forced "Pair Programming" which anybody who knew anything about Human Psychology/Organizational Behaviour would tell you is not workable unless the concerned people themselves seek it out. Nobody in the company practiced XP thereafter. If anybody is selling snake-oil it is the XP/Agile/Scrum proponents.

> i am dismissing boehm's work ... because decades of experience have shown most of it to be worthless

I am dismissing your dismissal of Boehm's work since through out this chain of comments you have not presented any evidence of any knowledge of Boehm's works. Do you know what is the COCOMO model and where it may/may not be applicable? Do you know what exactly is the Spiral Model and how to use it? I have pointed you to his distinguished career, awards earned and general standing in the industry and yet i have had no proof at all that you have read anything i pointed out. In short, you need to demonstrate competence with his work before anybody can take you at your word.

Finally, you also owe me an apology (though i have little hope that i would be getting one) for misrepresenting with malicious intent what i had said with your comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905726 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905477

> you deprecated beck's work as 'mere software'. this presupposes that software is 'mere', which is to say, less significant than the other topics at hand. this logically entails deprecation of oberon, which is also software

Stating Beck's work as "mere software" (i.e. nothing noteworthy) DOES NOT mean all software (from others) is "mere software". A course in Set Theory/Propositional/Predicate logic is in order here. The set of software that Wirth produced vs. the set of software that Beck produced are completely different and a considered judgement of the latter cannot be generalized to the former. You get zero marks for doing this.

> similarly, you said that when i repeated dijkstra's judgment that boehm's work, indeed boehm's entire field (and beck's!) was 'snake oil', i was betraying only my own ignorance. but that would logically entail that dijkstra, whose judgment i was relaying, was led to this judgment by his ignorance.

This is a false statement and again betrays your ignorance. Dijkstra's comments as regards "Software Engineering" were general observations on the state of the field at that time and NOT a critique of Boehm's work. They are two different things. Here is a longish IEEE pdf A Conversation with Barry Boehm: Recollections from 50 years of Software Engineering - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/52/8474478/08474492.pdf for your edification. Here Boehm mentions his interactions with Dijkstra and others and how they were all working together to solve what was then called "Software Crisis".

I have repeatedly pointed out (my other comments in this thread) your ignorance of Boehm's work and their significance but instead of acknowledging and rectifying it by some study, you are only making it worse by your comments where you are merely "Arguing for the sake of argument" wasting everybody's time and risking being seen as a caricature.