alt Hacker NewsIntersting. The author of the attached document is Dr. Thomas Haigh, a prominent academic historian specializing in the history of computing. The document challenges the conventional historical narrative surrounding the birth of software engineering. It argues that the widely accepted origin story centering on the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference and the "software crisis" was actually a narrative constructed by a group of academic researchers to promote their vision of programming as a mathematical discipline.
Dijkstra's rebellion against Algol 68 was deeply ironic. While he drafted the minority report condemning Algol 68 as an "obsolete" tool, his goal was not to make programming easier for everyday developers; instead he used the "software crisis" to advocate for replacing vast teams of average, working-class programmers with an elite corps of "mathematical engineers" modeled on himself. While Wirth and Hoare focused on building practical engineering tools, Dijkstra championed a highly theoretical, ivory-tower approach to programming based on strict mathematical principles and structured logic. Interestingly, both Wijngaarden (the primary architect of the highly complex "mathematical" and heavily criticized Algol 68 specification) and Dijkstra were Dutch.
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Alan Kay famously said:
"I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."
IDK what Dijkstra believed in terms of how programmers should have looked like, bu the did seem to have a sense (and taste) of a direction of programming that was lost within practicing software engineering and their prefered PLs.
My own incomplete opionion is that the net effect is that we ended up writing orderd of magnitude more code than necessary to solve the problems at hand. It's the equivalent of doing the computations manually instead of using a calculator. This has led to an industry that has served us well, but strictly speaking it was never necessary and much more could have been achieved with a fraction of the resources.
Dijkstra was wrong about ALGOL 68. ALGOL 68 was much better than the ALGOL W proposed by Wirth, or than its successor, Pascal, or than any of the languages designed later by Wirth.
Moreover, even the report about ALGOL 68 was not bad as a tool for a compiler designer who must search through it which is the correct syntax for various language features. The ALGOL 68 report even contained some subtle humor.
However where ALGOL 68 was a complete failure was that Van Wijngaarden and his collaborators did not publish any other document about ALGOL 68, except the Report.
The Report was completely unsuitable as the first document used by someone who wanted to know what ALGOL 68 is and what it does.
The only way in which ALGOL 68 could have succeeded as a language would have been if Van Wijngaarden would have published at least 3 documents to be read before reading the Report: a tutorial presenting programming examples of using ALGOL 68, a rationale for the design choices of the language (like the designers of the Ada language have published at its introduction) and a document explaining how the Report with the formal specification of the language has to be read.
Without these preliminary documents, the Report about ALGOL 68 looked too alien and it required too much effort to reverse engineer how it is supposed to be understood that even people with the experience of Dijkstra did not bother to make the effort to understand it, so they never knew whether there actually is something valuable in the report or not.
Many years ago, when I have seen for the first time the ALGOL 68 Report, my first thought was also that this must be some kind of useless garbage, and I did not read it. Only years later I tried again and that time I read most of it, so I could see that actually many important programming language features were described there for the first time, and some of them were actually better in ALGOL 68 than in later languages.
I really cannot understand what was in the mind of Van Wijngaarden, how could he believe that publishing this report alone, without accompanying it with a set of explanatory documents, would be enough for other people to learn what ALGOL 68 is. His reputation has certainly suffered after the publication of this report, so whichever was his reason to not write and publish more at that time, it was a wrong decision for his career.
Not sure if I agree with his conclusion that Dijkstra believed all programming should be done by an "elite corps" of programmers. He believed (rightly or wrongly) that undergraduate students could be taught his mathematical methods of programming, and that formal methods could make programming simpler and more manageable. Claiming he was against "working-class" programmers seems silly; anyone employed as a programmer will work for a living and so would be working-class.