Dijkstra's speech is total and complete arrogance.
Djikstra is all "You need to get more humility dammit! You think you don't have to listen to me and do exactly what I say because you're smart but I am smart so I /know/ you're not! Be more humble! I'm right and you are not!"
You can interpret parts of it in ways that are reasonable. We do need to be humble in any engineering endeavor is a stunning glimpse of the obvious and hardly worth an ACM Turing award lecture. His fondness for simultaneously formally proving what you program have basically very rarely if not actually never been made to work in a useful way by anyone and he falls into the trap of blaming everyone else for this practice not taking off. Everyone else is too arrogant to just do what the great man says when it doesn't work.
Humility is a thing. I've just trashed Djikstra which is obviously a thing that must be done with humility... The humility of a random, semi-anonymous internet messsage board post is probably more humble than an ACM Turing award acceptance lecture. I'm a humble person with much to be humble about.
Here he is talking about humility in the act of writing code, by recognizing the limits of the minds capacity and therefore keeping the code simple to understand rather than clever.
Why would clever code be hard to use? Dijkstra talked about messy code, there is nothing wrong with clever code. Algorithms are very clever, but they are self contained and therefore easy to read and reason about and therefore not a problem. Trying to achieve the same things without being clever will just create a mess.
> The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
Djikstra is all "You need to get more humility dammit! You think you don't have to listen to me and do exactly what I say because you're smart but I am smart so I /know/ you're not! Be more humble! I'm right and you are not!"
You can interpret parts of it in ways that are reasonable. We do need to be humble in any engineering endeavor is a stunning glimpse of the obvious and hardly worth an ACM Turing award lecture. His fondness for simultaneously formally proving what you program have basically very rarely if not actually never been made to work in a useful way by anyone and he falls into the trap of blaming everyone else for this practice not taking off. Everyone else is too arrogant to just do what the great man says when it doesn't work.
Humility is a thing. I've just trashed Djikstra which is obviously a thing that must be done with humility... The humility of a random, semi-anonymous internet messsage board post is probably more humble than an ACM Turing award acceptance lecture. I'm a humble person with much to be humble about.