Dijkstra Was Wrong About 'Radical Novelty'
I’ve read a lot from Djikstra, but never this one. After giving it a read, it’s one of his most concise summaries of his overall philosophy. If he’s wrong about anything, it’s how formal methods are not up to speed with the scale of software that we want to build, and that I believe we can never get away from operational reasoning.<p>I’ve been keeping a bug journal for some time now. It’s very enlightening because instead of making things up, I have raw data about what goes wrong at work, for me. For me, logic errors account for probably 40% of bugs. Another 40% are operational problems, mostly performance related. The rest are typos and unintentional breakages of parts of the program that are unknowingly coupled to something I changed.<p>All that being said, even when he’s wrong, he’s right. Logical soundness must come first. This cannot be done without math. All programmers are doing math whether they acknowledge it or not, specifically mathematical logic and set theory. Refactors to improve performance must keep the logical function of the program the same.<p>I believe him wholeheartedly when he says:<p>&gt; The statement that a given program meets a certain specification amounts to a statement about all computations that could take place under control of that given program. And since this set of computations is defined by the given program, our recent moral says: deal with all computations possible under control of a given program by ignoring them and working with the program. We must learn to work with program texts while (temporarily) ignoring that they admit the interpretation of executable code.<p>This man understood computation far more deeply than anyone out there today. Today, we have completely baseless claims being spouted like religion. We are in the era of the personality - a person’s personality determines how much they are listened to in our field. That is tragic, and while Djikstra might not have the answer for software of our scale, he has the only correct point of view in my opinion.