Aunc.3407 net.followup utzoo!decvax!harpo!duke!unc!smb Thu May 6 15:46:17 1982 Re: Dijkstra I thought Dijkstra was in his usual form in that article: opinionated, arrogant, and sometimes painfully right. The idea that language shapes thought isn't new, and it's fairly obviously in programming as well. The best example I can think of is APL vs. almost anything else: if you're used to, say, Pascal, you won't be able to program decently in APL; in Pascal, one deals with array elements, whereas in APL, one deals with arrays as wholes. There's also a functional style of programming in APL that makes for much more modular programs; again, Pascal doesn't encourage this nearly enough. (UNIX programmers tend to do well at that aspect; a good APL function is like a good filter.) The problem with APL isn't its control structure -- if that's what's making your program messy, it was almost certainly written in Pascal but transcribed in APL -- rather, it's just too easy to write extremely cryptic programs. No one who's read other stuff by Dijkstra should be at all puzzled by his emphasis on mathematics. Whether or not he's right -- and I think that his position has some merit -- the attitude that anyone can just sit down and code up an operating system or a compiler is, in Dijkstra's opinion, responsible for the sad state of the software industry today. As "A Discipline of Programming" makes very clear, he feels that programs *are* mathematical constructs; further, viewing them in that fashion leads to better, more correct programs. --Steve Bellovin Disclaimer: my dissertation is based on predicate transformers and the programming language described in "A Discipline of Programming".... ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.