131–140 of 229 posts
I like Dijkstra's quote: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
Maybe I'm stupid, but does he mean that as long as the task at hand is solved it doesn't matter how we categorize it. In the submarine case it would be "move through water", for example. Or is it deeper than that?
Ok, the first thought reading the title was "ah, surely this is about Dijkstras." The immediate second thought that came was the famous quote “I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras”, from Alan Kay should I believe https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/69528-i-don-t-know-how-many...
Hmm, time will tell on this rivalry. OOP may not be as harmful as GOTO, but it does seem to be falling out of favor. Dijkstras point of view may be as vindicated with one as with the other.
BASICs are perhaps the language HN readers are most likely to have seen which (in some cases) have the GOTO feature Dijkstra wrote the letter about, if you've seen goto in C for example, or C++, that resembles the go-to statement superficially, but in practice it's not very dangerous because it's constrained. Suppose my C++ f() recursive function adds a "goto" - it's not allowed to jump into a different function g(), it's not even allowed to jump into a different iteration of the same function f(), it's only allowed to change which part of the current iteration of the current function happens next, and it can't skip the destruction or initialization of variables, or other book keeping.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. He was interested in problem-solving, not philosophizing. The debates about AI going on right now are the kind he’d prefer to avoid.
To be fair, 10+ years ago this conversation definitely would have been pretty silly. Maybe about as interesting as asking "is there other life in the universe". No one knows the answer, it's an incredibly over discussed topic, and we won't know for sure for many years. I think those points still apply to AI intelligence today. However, the power of today's AI greatly outstrips anything Djikstra would have seen in his…
Ok, the first thought reading the title was "ah, surely this is about Dijkstras." The immediate second thought that came was the famous quote “I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras”, from Alan Kay should I believe https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/69528-i-don-t-know-how-many...
> "Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute. “The rest of the time,” he remarked, “is taken up by thinking.”9 For Dijkstra, writing and thinking blended into one activity. When preparing a new EWD, he always sought to produce the final version from the outset." > "He also never purchased a computer. Eventually, in the la…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
don't conflate 'Objects' with 'Object Oriented Design', if you split your data Structures from you algos then your just using an OOP-language to do programming not doing OOP. strong typing has nothing to do with OOP. static variable are replaced by singletons and other similar in spirit objects. OOP today is a 'No true Scotsman' concept much like communism, agile, and other vague by design terms. You can't argue agai…
Aren't you then just attacking a programming style that nobody actually uses or advocates? One of the most influential books about OOP - "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" - talks about composition, separating interface from implementation etc - not about hierarchies ( other than to prefer composition ).
There are more anecdotes about Dijkstra in this collection of testimonials written by his friends, colleagues, and students: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03392 . These are some of my favorites: From Tony Hoare: They removed recursion from Algol 60, on the grounds of its alleged inefficiency. Edsger's answer was that recursion was a useful programming tool, and every workman should be allowed to fall in love with their…
> The other two speakers that gave three one-hour lectures, Dr. McKay from IBM, Yorktown Heights and Professor Engelbart, SRI, Menlo Park, were both terrible. McKay spoke undiluted IBMerese for three full hours and I am not going to give any further comments; I only heard the first hour —like many participants— and that was enough (too much). Because I had an urgent letter to write I missed Engelbart's first lecture —it was not really a lecture, he showed a movie— but I attended his next two performances. He was not only terribly bad, he was dangerous as well, not so much on account of the product he was selling —a sophisticated on-line text-editor that could be quite useful— as on account of the way in which he appealed to mankind's lower instincts while selling it. The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous. (Sentences like "the half-life of a fresh university graduate is five years" are only correct if you have crammed the curriculum with volatile knowledge, erroneously presented as stuff worth knowing.) His anti-individualism surfaced when he recommended his gadget as a tool for easing the cooperation between persons and groups possibly miles apart, more or less suggesting that only then you are really "participating": no place for the solitary thinker. (Vide the sound track of the Monsanto movie showing some employees: "No geniuses here: just a bunch of average Americans, working together."!) The two talks I heard were absolutely insipid, he had handed out a paper "An augmented knowledge workshop.": the syntactical ambiguity in the title is characteristic for the level of the rest of the article. As a result of his presentations I have told a few of the participants that I had found, thanks to this seminar, a new software project. "Because in the years to come there will be a crippling shortage of competent programmers, I shall develop a software package, called "The Instruction Interpreter". From the moment of its completion, users do no longer need to program, they just give their instructions to the system." (This is only an edited version of one of the paragraphs of the Engelbart article!) I would have liked to start a discussion with him but I knew that my lack of mastery of the understatement would have made me too rude for English ears if I had spoken. Finally —after a more than two-hour effort in the middle of the night in sorting out his muddle— I decided that he was not worth the trouble. (One of the most offending conclusions I ever came to!)
Dijkstra is a wonderful source of memorable quotes and hot takes from the early days of software. A sampling: > “The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.” (Dijkstra, 1972) > “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (Dijkstra…
I didn't know the last one. That explains why Alan Kay spent a few minutes of one of his OOPSLA talks roasting Dijkstra[0] "I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras" Which, I dunno, feels kind of funny coming from him of all people. https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=342