Red Squirrel Reflections
Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development
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Red Squirrel Reflections
Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development
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Fri, 24 Jun 2005Thank you to Kent Schnaith for encouraging me to read Dijkstra's 1972 ACM Turing Lecture, The Humble Programmer. I am inspired by Dijkstra's story of the critical moment when he was deciding between theoretical physics and programming as a student at the University of Lieden...Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden's office door, asking him whether I could "speak to him for a moment"; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? |
