4 Jan
2012
4 Jan
'12
3:56 p.m.
Richard [legalize at xmission.com] wrote:
As someone who learned BASIC first and then a slew of
other
languages later, I would also disagree with Dijkstra's
statement. It's a nice sound bite that gets people's
attention, but it's neither a truism, nor is it even an
essential statement about programming. It's just his bias
showing through.
Dijkstra was more interested in whether you could prove that your
program behaved according to its specification. Whether your
program worked every time you ran it was less important than
whether it could conceivably fail.
Don't forget that you couldn't meet his definition of programmer
without being a mathematician.
It's apples and oranges, I think.
Antonio