dijkstra

Even Dijkstra didn't use it - the title was added by the editor.

I wasn't familiar with that Dijkstra quote, but yeah, it definitely gets at the same point I was getting at.

Correct implementation of floating point does not owe its genesis, but to thinkers like Knuth and Dijkstra who loudly pointed out the obvious deficiencies.

I don't think Dijkstra was actually interested in producing programs that accomplished some real-world effect.

Unless you are Dijkstra you don't get to use it, IMO.

Coming from the land of Dijkstra (UTAustin, by the way), pre- and post-conditions were how I learned to think about programs.

Knowing how pedantic Dijkstra were, I am sure he was talking about money, not value.

If it is good enough for people like Einstein and Feynman then it is good enough for me and Dijkstra in this case is just plain wrong.

I don't think that there's any need for scare quotes; Dijkstra was consistently and unapologetically elitist, and probably would (and maybe even did?) say as much himself.

If you look at one of the books where he and his colleagues teach how to do this (for example, A Method of Programming, by Dijkstra and Fiejen) it's pretty clear that the programmer him(her)self is supposed to come up with the formal specification.

I think it's not fair to assume that everyone enjoys programming for the same reason that you do, any more than it would be for Dijkstra to assume that others do or should for the same reason that he did.

Coming from the land of Dijkstra (the Netherlands), I was taught about this in college and it was very cool to use this to prove that post-conditions of a function are actually true (although finding good loop invariants was sometimes a bit annoying.

Like Dijkstra said, "Do what only you can do." And yes, I'm aware of Mark Zuckerberg, patio11 et al.

I often wonder half amused, "What Would Dijkstra Do?", every time I see the phrase referenced.

I'm pretty sure Guy Steele's paper title was tonge-in-cheek, as around a decade before the well-known letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by Edsger Dijkstra was published.

I think Dijkstra's viewpoint is a bit "elitist" here.

If you can get past Dijkstra's arrogance and abrasive presentation, he actually has some useful things to teach.

Even if Dijkstra's approach is not irrelevant, it is inhuman - it makes the programmer into a machine.

If you don't have a formal functional specification that adequately characterizes the program's behavior, then Dijkstra's approach is useless.