As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren’t as familiar with it. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.
- I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.
I think Dijkstra’s point was specifically about uni programs. A CS curriculum is supposed to make you train your mind for the theory of computation not for using specific computers (or specific programming languages).
Later during your career you will of course inevitably get bogged down into specific platforms, as you’ve rightly noted. And that’s normal because CS needs practical applications, we can’t all do research and “pure” science.
But I think it’s still important to keep it in mind even when you’re 10 or 20 or 30 years into your career and deeply entrenched into this and that technology. You have to always think “what am I doing this for” and “where is this piece of tech going”, because IT keeps changing and entire sections of it get discarded periodically and if you don’t ask those questions you risk getting caught in a dead-end.
He has a rant where he’s calling software engineers basically idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, saying the need for unit tests is a proof of failure. The rest of the rant is just as nonsensical, basically waving away all problems as trivial exercises left to the mentally challenged practitioner.
I have not read anything from/about him besides this piece, but he reeks of that all too common, insufferable, academic condescendance.
He does have a point about the theoretical aspect being often overlooked, but I generally don’t think his opinion on education is worth more than anyone else’s.
Article in question: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html
Sounds about right for an academic computer scientist, they are usually terrible software engineers.
At least that’s what I saw from the terrible coding practices my brother learned during his CS degree (and what I’ve seen from basically every other recent CS grad entering the workforce that didn’t do extensive side projects and self teaching) that I had to spend years unlearning him afterwards when we worked together on a startup idea writing lots of code.