Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if I agree with his conclusion that Dijkstra believed all programming should be done by an "elite corps" of programmers. He believed (rightly or wrongly) that undergraduate students could be taught his mathematical methods of programming, and that formal methods could make programming simpler and more manageable. Claiming he was against "working-class" programmers seems silly; anyone employed as a programmer…
His article "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" ( https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103... ) really resonated with me in the past, albeit it might be enforcing the assessment of the parent post regarding his more elitist approach to software development. He says: > A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "Th…
Re: Dijkstra's Crisis: The End of Algol and Beginning of Software Engineering (2010) [pdf]
#31That sounds even more absurdly elitist today in part because "How to program if you cannot" is literally a solved problem now.