[dkarl]

My degree is in math, I love Dijkstra, and I think a lot of my colleagues have often created more work than necessary for themselves by treating pieces of code empirically when they could have got a more precise understanding by spending an hour reading it carefully.

However, I think the most fascinating thing about Dijkstra is how wrong he turned out to be in his prediction that an empirical approach would not scale.

I suspect that approaching programming like Dijkstra might have paid off long-term, but it was rarely a good deal in the short term, both for bad reasons (the empirical approach is a quicker and cheaper way to create buggy software that we can sell and claim as achievements on our performance reviews) and valid reasons (the unreliability of humans and hardware ultimately forces us to approach real computer systems, which are always a composite of hardware, software, and humans, empirically anyway.)

[hcs]

As they say in a somewhat different context: worse is better