Answers to software engineering students

Let’s recall what Dijkstra tells us about software engineering:

As economics is known as “The Miserable Science”, software engineering should be known as “The Doomed Discipline”, doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter “How to program if you cannot.”

(see The doomed discipline)

Well, Dijkstra digs a little deeper in his famous answers to engineering students, which were kindly translated into Spanish by Javier Smaldone. A short excerpt of the original:

Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering

[The approximate reconstruction of the questions is left as an exercise to the reader.]

• It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
• The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don’t master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
• In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Along the way Dijkstra quotes two of his earlier notes, EWD898 (1984) and EWD920 (1985).

Austin, 28 November 2000

prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712 - 1188
USA