[srean]

That's a famous quote and age might have mellowed him. But he was not like that at all in person with his students. He did insist that one be precise with ones words.

The origin of the quote may have more to do with cultural differences between the Dutch and Americans.

[blast]

That's a great point which never occurred to me about Dijkstra, even though I knew where he came from. My father in law used to like this joke: "He was Dutch and behaved as such."

[Gibbon1]

I feel there is a tension between computer science is math and computer science is plumbing.

[bittercynic]

Why not the both?

Some seem to think that math is somehow above plumbing, but modern society couldn't exist without both, and I'd argue that modern plumbing is more critical to our health and well being than modern math.

[throaskjdsakn]

plumbing is one of those inventions that's so old we forget its importance

[tharkun__]

The plumber knows how many inches per foot the pipe has to drop in order for the poop to flow away and not get stuck in the pipe. It's easy enough to either not drop it enough and everything gets stuck or for it to drop too much and the water flows away but the poop stays in place. And they're the ones that actually make it happen and their clients really do care about that in the end. Without knowing this the plumber is nothing. They don't necessarily need to know they why and especially don't need to calculate it out!

Some mathematician can probably calculate that properly. Some mathematician probably first did calculate that out to prove it. I'm not entirely certain that a mathematician was the reason that we know what drop we need. A lot of things in "real life" were "empirically discovered" and used and done for centuries before a mathematician proved it.

Exceptions prove the rule, like when we calculate(d) things out for space travel before ever attempting it ;)

[antonvs]

I’d want to see an example of Dijkstra’s “arrogance” that wasn’t justified.

The “truths that might hurt” essay is a great example. Yeah, the truth hurts for many people. People don’t like being called out on their folly, particularly if it’s something they don’t personally control. That Durant make it “arrogant” to point it out.

Also, Alan Kaye is overrated. Object orientation is one of those painful truths.

[ninalanyon]

Object orientation is a great tool and I wouldn't be without it. But like all tools it has to be applied in the right way in the appropriate situation and is not universally useful.

[antonvs]

Classic object orientation is wrong. It conflates things that shouldn’t be conflated.

Look at Rust, Haskell, Go, Elm, Purescript, or Idris. All of them have something like traits or interfaces, and don’t need the rest of the badly designed OO machinery.

OO was basically a wrong turn that was taken some time after the development of CLU. It appealed to some people intuitively - including me, I implemented and sold a commercial OO language product in the early 90s - but it was always bad technically.

[strken]

I'm less concerned about "justified" and more about "useful". If you behave offensively to everyone around you, then you have become your own worst enemy in the war of ideas.

Ignaz Semmelweis was right. He also died in an asylum, having utterly failed to convince doctors to wash their hands between patients.

[antonvs]

What do you think Semmelweis could have done differently, that actually could have worked?

The assumption in what you’re saying is that it’s possible to convince ignorant, recalcitrant, authority-rejecting people to change their behavior. That’s great! Could you sketch an approach to get people to seriously try to solve global warming, then? No? How about fascism? No? So, what is your point, exactly?

[strken]

Well, he could have done what Pasteur or Koch did and become a pivotal figure in inventing germ theory.

He could also have just lived out his life in obscurity and made things a little better in his hospital, doing what he could and quietly regretting that he couldn't change everyone's mind, until the emergence of germ theory.

Instead, he got beaten to death by asylum guards after annoying and alienating everyone around him. That seems like a very obvious bad ending to me.

I can't sketch out an approach to make the entire global population to listen to you. I can, however, warn you that being a gigantic douchebag to all your colleagues will not make them take your proposals seriously.