[PRL] dijkstra anecdote

Joe Marshall jrm at ccs.neu.edu
Fri Dec 5 09:57:52 EST 2003


David Herman <dherman at ccs.neu.edu> writes:

>> Firstly, simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require
>> hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be
>> appreciated.

Functional programming, Lisp, Scheme, Cambridge Polish notation
(s-expressions), proper tail recursion, first-class continuations,
bignums, automatic memory management, higher-order functions, ...

>> Secondly we observe massive investments in efforts that are heading
>> in the opposite direction.

Mainstream ``object-oriented'' programming (ala Java), C++, Perl,
Java, C#, infix notation with dozens of levels of precedence (which of
course require parser generators), a twisty maze of iteration
constructs, all different, `values' vs. `objects', XML, SOAP, ZOPE,
aspect-oriented programming...

Windows XP:  40 million lines of code at a cost of > $2.5 billion

Debian Linux:  55 million lines of code, estimated cost > $1.9 billion

>> ... 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).

or Guido's ....



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