[harry8]

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.

[signa11]

> Dijkstra's speech is total and complete arrogance.

and hence the quintessential quote

   arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-dijkstras

     - alan-kay