
On hygiene, intellectual and otherwise (1989) - awelkie
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1054.html
======
ideonexus
"The Royal Surgical Society even issued a strongly worded Manifesto..."

"the Department of Defence declared a moratorium on all funding of
sterilization research..."

I can find no evidence that such a manifesto ever existed or that the DoD ever
took such an action. When I search for these, the top link is this essay. I
know there was resistance to sterilization, but I suspect Dijkstra may have
been exaggerating it to make his point.

~~~
Jtsummers
Definitely an exaggeration. This EWD is meant to satirize the position of
people who argue against certain development approaches that might yield
higher quality software by comparing them to the fools (who actually did
exist) that argued against sterilization. And then he takes it further.

Ironically, of course, the DoD did fund the research and development of
several programming languages and tools that would have offered precisely the
hygiene Dijkstra would like to see in software development. Specifically I'm
referring to Ada. Which was rejected by the industry (for various reasons,
some legit and some not).

~~~
Ace17
> the DoD did fund the research and development of several programming
> languages and tools that would have offered precisely the hygiene Dijkstra
> would like to see in software development.

No tool will force you to wash your hands. Hygiene is a matter of knowledge,
and discipline ; and it's mostly unrelated to the tools you're using.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Uhm, this is wrong. Checklists. You can cheat the checklist, but it makes
washing your hands a matter of following known procedures, not knowledge and
discipline.

Like, airlines cut down on pilot errors through checklists and improving
procedures, not by making pilots more knowledgable and disciplined.

~~~
gbacon
A checklist is a mere piece of paper without the discipline to use it every
time.

~~~
rabidrat
Discipline can be structural and social. You still do better with a checklist;
otherwise you're limited to a memorable meme. Or were you making a joke?
(Sorry if you were)

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golergka
It's an exaggerated satirical version of real life history of practice of
washing hands.

> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality
> to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established
> scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by
> the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific
> explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the
> suggestion that they should wash their hands.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)

------
smaddox
"We know that no responsible scientist guesses his formulae but derives
them..."

Are you sure about that, Dijkstra? Richard Feynam seems to disagree:

"In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess
it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute
the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we
guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation
results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it
directly with observations to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the
key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it
doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If
it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

\- Richard Feynman

~~~
kirkules
Are you sure the meaning of "guess" in each quote is the same as in the other?
I'm not convinced that Dijkstra's comment, in context, contradicts Feynman's.

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gumby
Is that truly the history of the reaction to boiling instruments?

This part seems relevant today:

> We know that no responsible scientist guesses his formulae but derives
> them...

I am troubled by the epistemological blankness of our age of multi-gigabyte
mathematical proofs and inscrutable multilayer neural nets....

------
danielvf
Since there's a bit of confusion in the comments, this is a well done work of
satire, taking things software developerment individuals and organizations
have said, and showing their ludicrousness by having the medical profession
say them.

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russnewcomer
Dijkstra seems to be overstating the Swift opposition to a very Modest
Proposal.

n.b. this is a very certain kind of satire. It's not a literal retelling of
something that happened.

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quickben
Under "otherwise", I suggest applying hygiene to the multitude ideas we have
for projects.

Treat them as flowers in a garden. Cultivate some, weed out others. The most
focus should be on the few that flourish best, and they'll be products.

------
wrinkl3
So what exactly is the intellectual hygiene he refers to? Being rational and
overcoming one's biases?

~~~
jdbernard
Formal verification of software:

 _We know that no responsible scientist guesses his formulae but derives them
and in the same vein we derive our programs by formal calculation. This is a
time-honoured tradition, formalization is just a matter of intellectual
hygiene, and we should be quite confident that, indeed, this undertaking makes
all the sense in the world, but we hesitate and are ambivalent about it
because, all around us, our hygienic practices are opposed, derided and
ridiculed._

