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I think anthropomorphism is worst of all. I have now seen programs “trying to do things”, “wanting to do things”, “believing things to be true”, “knowing things” etcDon’t be so naive as to believe tha…
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The computer “user” isn’t a real person of flesh and blood, with passions and brains.scientific publishing is severely hampered by the invention of “the innocent reader” and even “the poor reader”! E…
The more things change ...
The conclusion that successful computer programming will eventually require a reasonable amount of scientific education of a rather mathematical nature is not too welcome among the guild members: they…
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Programming Methodology has for quite some years been in danger of being killed in its youth by the superstition that underlies so much of the Artificial Intelligence activity, viz. that everything di…
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Each tool shapes its users, and each programming language reflects, in its capacity as a tool, a picture of the programmer and his task. A rather intuitive, not very explicitly described but commonly…
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It is not so much the computer manufacturers, that want to do as if they sell an easy product; it is not so much the managers of software projects, that would like to view the programming activity as…
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The programmers were horrified too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite understanding what they were doing and their professional satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had fi…
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because they found the human mind too difficult and elusive an object for their study, turned to the study of rats instead, and even restrict that study —as I saw expressed recently— “to the most mech…
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Should I have asked him, why mathematicians have not developed a notation that would enable everyone, no matter how ill-equipped otherwise, to do mathematics? EWD #540…
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In the world around us we encounter two radically different views of programming: * View A: Programming in essence is very easy. * View B: Programming is intrinsically very difficult. EWD #540…
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I don’t know if I can take hearing another self-aggrandizing nincompoop get up on stage and tout their amazing software Zack Morris, “The State of the Art is Terrible” (!)…
On the love/hate relationship of the world with computing ...
Let us now turn our attention to computing science. It is hated, of course, like any other science. In order to understand the specific distaste it evokes, and along with it all the pressures exerted…