By dotCore
via kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.in
Published: Feb 03 2012 / 09:31
Two recent posts on this blog ([1], [2]) discussed Dijkstra's relation toward another Turing Award winner, John McCarthy, and his creation: Lisp. Although sometimes ambiguous, it appears that Dijkstra's attitude was more critical than enthusiastic. Dijkstra complimented Lisp on indirect way, like "it inspired many programmers". However, he wrote more directly that "LISP's syntax is so atrocious that I never understood its popularity" and "Lisp 1.5 was extremely poor language."
Comments
yakkoh replied ago:
Dijkstra had an obsession with correct/incorrect programs. This lead to the almost complete removal of the goto instructions although it's available even in recent languages. see C# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/13940fs2(v=vs.71).aspx
Proving a nontrivial program correct is very^2 hard. But right now, I can't stop writing useful programs because the have errors.
This is like saying: since cars break down we are not going to make cars until they are perfect.
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