What a quote! I would have opted for exterminator — a satisfactorily legitimate profession, and a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek for those who know what is really meant.
As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. Of course, this was a bit before our meaning of "bug" became common knowledge, so it always got a good laugh. I'm thrilled to have followed my childhood dream to be a part of this wonderful industry of err exterminators. Happy PD everybody!
He probably would not have chosen that. Another piece of Dijkstra lore is that he really hated the term "bug". He said that by using this term the programmer tried to avoid his responsibility for making correct programs by suggesting that errors somehow creep into your program out of their own volition through no fault of the programmer.
Dijkstra was really hard core in terms of correctness. He insisted that each programmer had to work out a mathematical proof that his program will always provide correct output for every single possible input, and submit that proof when submitting the program. Things did not work out that way.
As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. Of course, this was a bit before our meaning of "bug" became common knowledge, so it always got a good laugh. I'm thrilled to have followed my childhood dream to be a part of this wonderful industry of err exterminators. Happy PD everybody!