If you like "The Secrets of Consulting", the next one for you should be "Exploring requirements: quality before design", by Gause & Weinberg. What an eye opener it was for me!
Just one of dozens of amazing passages in this book (page 48):
> "... its density was a little better than that of the other acid, and it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid -and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm for a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)"
I think it's a bimodal distribution. On the one hand you have the unflappable who just calmly watch what happens. On the other you have the far too flappable who is already out of the lab and making good time out of the building and the state.
I meant what was shown in this movie [0]. In a nutshell, the ability to remain calm when the unexpected happens, to try to solve the problem, or at least to not make it worse.
Ah so this is where the cartoon trope of jets of boiling fluid speeding up from a lab flask came from. I thought artists were exaggerating, but I guess not this time.
I always debug with printf for the clear benefits you mention, and I happen to know another one.
Because I am commited to the Way of Printf, I have seen myself anticipating where printfs might be needed, and limiting the complexity of each segment of code to support printfs that aren't there yet.
In my experience, commitment to printf debugging incentivizes coding for simplicity and observability.
You noticed the conceptual integrity of the systems, as described by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.
From Chapter 4:
> "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas."
> "Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood."
> "All my own experience convinces me, and I have tried to show, that the conceptual integrity of a system determines its ease of use. Good features and ideas that do not integrate with a system's basic concepts are best left out. If there appear many such important but incompatible ideas, one scraps the whole system and starts again on an integrated system with different basic concepts."
There are more anecdotes about Dijkstra in this collection of testimonials written by his friends, colleagues, and students: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03392.
These are some of my favorites:
From Tony Hoare:
They removed recursion from Algol 60, on the grounds of its alleged inefficiency. Edsger's answer was that recursion was a useful programming tool, and every workman should be allowed to fall in love with their tools.
From J.R. Rao:
He would repeatedly stress the importance of choosing words carefully: "If you have to use your hands, then there is something wrong with your words", he would say, adding "imagine there is a blind man in your audience, how would you speak?"
Over time, I came to learn and appreciate that Prof. Dijkstra's class was operating at two different planes. There was the lesson and then, the lesson within the lesson. At one level, the goal was to solve the presented problem. At the second and more richer meta-level was the approach for arriving at the solution.
Prof. Dijkstra taught us that in computing science, complexity comes for free; one has to work hard for simplicity.
From Alain J. Martin:
In his technical writing, he used language like a precision tool. For him, precision did not necessarily imply ease of reading, and he stated that the reader also had to make an effort to understand.
From Christian Lengauer:
Professionally, Edsger's impact on me is best summarized by his ATAC Rule 0: "Don't make a mess of it." It made me strive for simplicity in notation and modelling throughout my working life and take unpleasant complexity as an indication of a possible lack of comprehension.
I decided against writing with a fountain pen. He never took issue with this, except in a letter that he posted seven weeks before his death: "I hope you will overcome your resistance and learn how to fill a pen without soiling your fingers, or otherwise you are denying yourself one of the joys of life." These were his last written words to me.
From Lex Bijlsma:
A famous quote of EWD is the following: 'I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me' (EWD1213). I can testify that this actually works.
From K. Mani Chandy:
When I write papers, even now, I still see Edsger over my shoulder going "Tsk! Tsk!" [...] I found that being less sloppy not only helped my readers understand what I had written, but most importantly, helped me from confusing myself.
From David Turner:
I have an invisible Edsger inside my head which looks over my shoulder when I am writing and quietly goes "Tut tut" if I write something that is muddled or not accurate. I don't always listen to that voice but know I should.
From J Strother Moore:
At faculty meetings when Edsger was not present it was common for someone to say "If Edsger were here he'd say such-and-such."
He came to work in the summer wearing a big Texas cowboy hat - they are made to keep you cool in the Texas sun. Often he would have on a cowboy's string tie. So from the waist up, he looked more Texan than I did. But he almost always wore shorts and sandals, which ruined the cowboy image completely.
From David Gries:
Edsger critiqued not the person but only what they said, and later one could drink a beer and laugh as if nothing happened. Technical differences and shortcomings should be treated this way.
From Maarten van Emden, edited for brevity:
Douglas Engelbart aroused Dijkstra's ire so much that he needed a whole page of vituperative prose to offload his emotions (EWD387). What has Engelbart done to provoke this outburst? One only has to refer to "Engelbart's Law", see Wikipedia. Its reasoning seems to run as follows: look at what mere printing has done as a tool for thought; the system demonstrated is so much more powerful than printing that it must quickly lead to Intellect Augmentation. This way Engelbart showed no appreciation for the rich culture developed over centuries. What makes printing a powerful tool for thought is mostly due to other things than technology. Much of the power of this culture comes from publishers and editors, who sniff out what is worth printing and hold back what is not. Another important component of this culture is provided by libraries and librarians. Much is due to scholarly societies, which started printing their proceedings and to commercial publishers, which created journals, each with their editorial board and unseen bevy of reviewers. Most of all it is due to the idea of a university.
> The other two speakers that gave three one-hour lectures, Dr. McKay from IBM, Yorktown Heights and Professor Engelbart, SRI, Menlo Park, were both terrible. McKay spoke undiluted IBMerese for three full hours and I am not going to give any further comments; I only heard the first hour —like many participants— and that was enough (too much). Because I had an urgent letter to write I missed Engelbart's first lecture —it was not really a lecture, he showed a movie— but I attended his next two performances. He was not only terribly bad, he was dangerous as well, not so much on account of the product he was selling —a sophisticated on-line text-editor that could be quite useful— as on account of the way in which he appealed to mankind's lower instincts while selling it. The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous. (Sentences like "the half-life of a fresh university graduate is five years" are only correct if you have crammed the curriculum with volatile knowledge, erroneously presented as stuff worth knowing.) His anti-individualism surfaced when he recommended his gadget as a tool for easing the cooperation between persons and groups possibly miles apart, more or less suggesting that only then you are really "participating": no place for the solitary thinker. (Vide the sound track of the Monsanto movie showing some employees: "No geniuses here: just a bunch of average Americans, working together."!) The two talks I heard were absolutely insipid, he had handed out a paper "An augmented knowledge workshop.": the syntactical ambiguity in the title is characteristic for the level of the rest of the article. As a result of his presentations I have told a few of the participants that I had found, thanks to this seminar, a new software project. "Because in the years to come there will be a crippling shortage of competent programmers, I shall develop a software package, called "The Instruction Interpreter". From the moment of its completion, users do no longer need to program, they just give their instructions to the system." (This is only an edited version of one of the paragraphs of the Engelbart article!) I would have liked to start a discussion with him but I knew that my lack of mastery of the understatement would have made me too rude for English ears if I had spoken. Finally —after a more than two-hour effort in the middle of the night in sorting out his muddle— I decided that he was not worth the trouble. (One of the most offending conclusions I ever came to!)
James and Yoly really enjoy living here in Madrid, and they explain the good and the bad of our culture and customs. No bullsh*t, warts and all.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@spainrevealed