[PRL] dijkstra anecdote

[David Herman]

Some grist for procrastination, for those (like me) who don't feel like 
doing their 713 homework... This is from EWD 1243 
<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1243.PDF>, "The next 
fifty years."

The interesting passage:

> All through history, simplifications have had a much greater 
> long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity... I 
> also expect [the opportunity for simplification] to stay with us for 
> decades to come. Firstly, simplicity and elegance are unpopular 
> because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education 
> to be appreciated. Secondly we observe massive investments in efforts 
> that are heading in the opposite direction. I am thinking about 
> so-called design-aids such as circuit simulators, protocol verifiers, 
> algorithm animators, graphical aids for the hardware designer, and 
> elaborate systems for version control: by their suggestion of power, 
> they rather invite than discourage complexity.

The amusing passage:

> Also, we know that we can only use a system by virtue of our knowledge 
> of its properties, and, similarly, pay the greatest possible care to 
> the choice of concepts in terms of which we build up our theories: we 
> know we have to keep it crisp, disentangled, and simple if we refuse 
> to be crushed by the complexities of our own making. But, obviously, 
> the market pulls in the opposite direction. I still remember finding a 
> book on how to use "Wordperfect 5.0" of more than 850 pages, in fact a 
> dozen pages more than my 1951 edition of Georg Joos, "Theoretical 
> Physics"! It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret 
> Society of the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.
>
> And then we have the software engineers, who only mention formal 
> methods in order to throw suspicion on them. In short, we should not 
> expect too much support [from] the computing community at large. And 
> from the mathematical community I have learned not to expect too much 
> support either, as informality is the hallmark of the Mathematical 
> Guild, whose members --like poor programmers-- derive their 
> intellectual excitement from not quite knowing what they are doing and 
> prefer to be thrilled by the marvel of the human mind (in particular 
> their own ones). For them, the Dream of Leibniz is a Nightmare.
>
> In summary, we are on our own.

Dave