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The Humble Programmer (1972) [pdf]

• h2s 14y ago
  In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products. To put it in another way; as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society's ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. This is a beautifully succinct and profound summation of the entire history of software engineering. I enjoyed this all the more because I initially skimmed past the introductory page and have only just realised that Dijsktra wrote it. As an aside I would like to insert a warning to those who identify the difficulty of the programming task with the struggle against the inadequacies of our current tools, because they might conclude that, once our tools will be much more adequate, programming will no longer be a problem. I think this is as true today as it was 40 years ago. In fact it almost makes the idea of "No Silver Bullet" seem derivative.