Gordon Joly <gordo@loopzilla.org> wrote:
+---------------
| "Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied
| mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure
| mathematicians."
...
| "How do we tell truths that might hurt?"
| Edsger W. Dijkstra, 18 June 1975
+---------------

Indeed! Many of the other "truths that might hurt" in that article
are still very applicable today, too. E.g., the one that's my
favorite when I think of Common Lisp versus other languages:

	"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen
	a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to
	do it with ten blunt axes instead."
and:
	"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally
	good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital
	asset of a competent programmer."

Note: Dijkstra is *not* a native speaker on English. Yet (at
least in his technical writing, as I have not heard him speak)
his English is a delight to read, unvaryingly precise and pellucid
(albeit with occasional quaintly-archaic grammar).

+---------------
| quoted from
| http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
| University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science
| CS655: Programming Languages, Spring 2001
+---------------

Hmmm... That seems to have been transcribed from the
original. A more authoritative copy may be found at
<URL:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/>, where all
of the publicly-available EWD### reports are archived:

	<URL:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF>

[Note: Most of these are PDFs of scanned images of Dijkstra's
orginal hand-typed manuscripts. Not always the best quality,
but historically interesting.]

And he's still cranking out some goodies, e.g.:

	<URL:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1304.PDF>
	"The end of computing science?"

in which he argues that we *still* don't have a clue about how
to separate the complexity intrinsic to a given problem from that
"accidentally" added by the implementation of a chosen solution.
[Although one might suggest that the PLT group's "How To Design
Programs" <URL:http://www.htdp.org/> takes a useful step in that
direction...]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 30-3-510		<rpw3@sgi.com>
SGI Network Engineering		<http://www.rpw3.org/>
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.		Phone: 650-933-1673
Mountain View, CA  94043	PP-ASEL-IA

[Note: aaanalyst@sgi.com and zedwatch@sgi.com aren't for humans ]