

E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On hygiene, intellectual and otherwise - gdee
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1054.html

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olavk
Not my favorite kind of argument: (1) Show in detail how "the establishment"
in some historical controversy was spectacularily wrong. (2) Use this as proof
for the superiority of your own position in a completely unrelated modern
debate.

There was a submission some time ago which used the same device to argue
against global warming. Since "the powers that be" had been wrong in the case
of Galileo, then _obviously_ the mainstream belief in man-made climate change
was the same kind of wrong-headed belief in unscientific dogma. I have seen
the same kind of argument for Creationism - since science was wrong in the
case of the ether and frenology, then obviously the theory of evolution is
also wrong.

~~~
Alex3917
On the other hand, the arguments that FDA is using today to combat the use of
checklists (also for sterilization) are almost exactly the same.

These arguments make a lot of sense when there is a common cognitive error.
For example, the cognitive error that caused mistake A is also causing mistake
B. I don't have enough domain expertise to say whether or not that was the
case in this article, for its intended purpose.

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tokenadult
Does anyone have a source for the history related in the submitted article? I
know routine aseptic precautions were opposed by quite a few doctors in the
nineteenth century for quite a while, but I've never read anything about
detailed reasons (other than convenience) given for not washing hands
regularly or sterilizing instruments. How much of this is on the historical
record, and how much of this is story-telling by Dijkstra, who was quite an
able story-teller?

~~~
murr
I would think that this is parable rather than history. Some of the giveaways
are the dig at "operational research" and the mention of the DoD (which a
meticulous writer like EWD would have known did not exist until much later).

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JoelMcCracken
"...if sterilization of the knife really helped, everybody would be able to
operate and that would be totally intolerable."

Crazy. What?

Humans never cease to amaze me.

~~~
patio11
All guilds, and physicians are a guild, hate anything that breaks the
mystique.

Home schooling empirically works with non-professional instructors. Teach For
America will take any warm body with a college degree and subject students to
their care for a few years, without negative results. Private schools
routinely outperform public schools, even with similar student pools.

But still, the guild controls education with an iron fist, because if you let
non-guild teachers teach, then there will be total anarchy. Or if you paid
guild teachers based on skill rather than age -- because, after all, the guild
warrants that all guild members with ten years of continuous service at one
guildhouse are exactly equivalent in skill in every way.

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wglb
And the resistance to these ideas continues to this day, seemingly unabated.
The consequences are all around us, in our mailboxes.

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albertcardona
A great man that knows how to put current issues in historical perspective.
Yet, his case here doesn't rest so well: software hacking without a plan has
generated good software, _after applying cleanup, refactoring, and what not._

A great read.

~~~
gruseom
Knuth made TeX. What did Dijkstra make?

~~~
mad44
Dijkstra made the "THE operating system".

THE was the first multiprogramming operating system beating IBM to the punch.

The THE system apparently introduced the first forms of software-based memory
segmentation (the Electrologica X8 did not support hardware-based memory
management)[1], freeing programmers from being forced to use actual physical
locations on the drum memory. It did this by using a modified ALGOL compiler
(the only programming language supported by Dijkstra's system -- Dijkstra
implemented the first compiler for ALGOL) to "automatically generate calls to
system routines, which made sure the requested information was in memory,
swapping if necessary."

Apart from this, Dijkstra is the inventor of all shortest path algorithm (used
in the link-state routing in the Internet), opened the self-stabilizing
systems field, which was again very influential in several internet and sensor
networks protocols.

Dijkstra refused to classify himself as a theorist or systems person.

BTW, Knuth would probably be the first person to object to your comment.

~~~
gruseom
It was a real question. Only an idiot would question Dijsktra's well-known
contributions to CS. My issue is that his profuse judgmental statements about
practical system-building strike me as misguided. When I read those of his
writings he sounds like an intolerant theorist in a bubble.

From the web pages I've read, it's not clear that THE was ever used. It's also
not clear what Dijsktra actually did on Algol. Indeed I always thought it was
Naur, not Dijsktra, who is associated with making the first good Algol
compiler. Also, Dijsktra is described as having "led the team" on these
projects, which is ambiguous.

I'm happy to be wrong, but it would certainly be interesting if Dijsktra's
disastrous (to my mind) pronouncements about how to make software were
grounded in deep experience with successfully making it. It would be much less
surprising if they were grounded in brilliant theoretical work and a habit of
telling other people they're doing everything wrong.

Edit: it's my fault for being cryptic, but inventing algorithms does not count
as what I meant by "making" something, i.e. building a working software system
that people use. Anybody who's heard of Dijkstra knows that he invented
algorithms.

Edit: but then I like Beethoven better than Mozart too :)

