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:
reply> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
All right, he believed that all programming should be done by his approach, or one highly similar. He could train undergrads, but anyone who wasn't trained his way shouldn't be programming. Is that a fair statement?
replyThis is such a common position in just about every professional industry, codified legally or as personal belief, that it barely qualifies to be called out as unique to Dijkstra.
replyYes, who would say structured programming is bad these days, though maybe it wasn’t a popular sentiment at the time. Though I find this thread funny, “Dijktra was elitist, oh no, he did the gatekeeping, what horror, let’s abandon structured programming and seeing programming as a discipline altogether”.
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