Dijkstra Isnt God

Some people on this wiki seem to think that what EwDijkstra says, goes, and make regular use of AppealToAuthority fallacy when presenting arguments they feel are true because Dijkstra says so. I say, over my *#$&%#@!@& dead body.

Dijkstra was a mortal human being, like you and me. That means he was fallible -- he succumbed to opinions, belief systems, and prejudices just as much as he advocated hard logic and symbolic reasoning. Nobody is perfect, not even Dijkstra. I look up to and respect Dijkstra. He was obviously intelligent, was fueled by a desire to see perfection in his profession, and inspired and influenced many advances in our art. Nonetheless, even Dijkstra can be wrong, sometimes.

Okay, agreed, but this page should state some actual examples of where he was wrong instead of just stating he was wrong sometimes. A section here could state where and why he was wrong and on what topics

In the section '5.3. Nested procedures and Dijkstra's display' in Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass, Wirth writes, "It turned out that the good idea [Dijkstra's display] had aggravated rather than solved the problem."

Some questionable EwDijkstraQuotes:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

"Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure." "If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well, that would be enough immortality for me."

"The go to statement should be abolished from all 'higher level' programming languages (i.e. everything except -perhaps- plain machine code.)"

Possibly one of the most annoying things about Dijkstra is that he never worked on commercial projects. It is easy to sit on the sidelines, insist on perfection and decide exactly how much scathing criticism to heap upon people that are genuinely making an effort to help people within the limits of the tools, education and social agreements (with business, BAs, QAs, and other devs) that apply in their circumstances. Many other famous computer scientists (for example RobinMilner) actually held programming jobs at some point during their lives. Also, contrary to what you might have thought from reading Dijkstra: working and making money aren't innately bad things.


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