From: PV

To: Editor

 

Silly question, but have you read much of Dijkstra? I'm ashamed to say that I have not, but this quote is one of what I hope to be many other great discoveries for me in his writings. RIP

 

"I hope very much that computing science at large will become more mature, as I am annoyed by two phenomena that both strike me as symptoms of immaturity.

 

The one is the widespread sensitivity to fads and fashions, and the wholesale adoption of buzzwords and even buzz notes. Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract", "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

 

The other one is the sensitivity to the market place, the unchallenged assumption that industrial products, just because they are there, become by their mere existence a topic worthy of scientific attention, no matter how grave the mistakes they embody. In the sixties the battle that was needed to prevent computing science from degenerating to "how to live with the 360" has been won, and "courses" -- usually "in depth"!-- about MVS or what have you are now confined to the not so respectable subculture of the commercial training circuit. But now we hear that the advent of the microprocessors is going to revolutionize computing science! I don't believe that, unless the chasing of dayflies is confused with doing research. A similar battle may be needed."

 

--Edsger W. Dijkstra, My Hopes Of Computing Science, 1979

 

Humm, I fear that the battle (if indeed it was fought) has been lost; I just wonder if the war has been lost also.

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: PV

 

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

 

Anybody with a brain and some education cannot fail to see this. That is why the system does not develop brains and does not want education, because then it won’t be able to sell crap anymore.

 

It's not just IT and computers, it's the whole society. To win, society must fundamentally change, and as we could see from the last "election", it doesn't even when there is a breakdown crisis.

 

Posted 02/21/03

 

 

 

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