> The sooner we can forget that FORTRAN has ever existed, the better, for as a vehicle of thought it is no longer adequate: it wastes our brainpower, is too risky and therefore too expensive to use.

Apparently the ISO/IEC 1539-1:2023 [1] committee didn't get the memo.

[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/82170.html

It’s a real shame Dijkstra rubbed so many people the wrong way.

Maybe his incisive polemic, which I greatly enjoy, was all but pandering to a certain elitist sensibility in the end.

To make manageable programs, you have to trade off execution speed both on the cpu and in the organization. His rather mathematized prescriptions imply we should hire quarrelsome academics such as him to reduce performance and slow down product development[initially…] all in the interest of his stratified sensibilities of elegance and simplicity.

Sucks to be right when that’s the truth.

This is what I thought～

For the "I haven't read it before and I ain't reading all that" crowd, I made a top-down, Q&A-based mind map summary of Dijkstra's argument:

https://app.gwriter.io/#/mindmap/view/7df03a6f-d1b8-4a0a-bb5...