And even this improvement wasn’t universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn’t ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate “the ease of programming” with the ease of making undetected mistakes.

This guy was writing in the year x86 was first introduced, and I still feel like I see this attitude around.

(He manages to shoehorn in a “kids these days” paragraph too, though)

All he made was some dinky algorithm. Google Bard could do that in three minutes flat smh.

Thx for sharing this . Really hope people read it.

See, Dijkstra was talking about people trying to create programs in natural language. He didn’t say not to use your natural language to hire someone else to make a formal program. This is people using natural language to hire an LLM to make a formal program, and asking LLMs is like asking people, so it’s Dijkstra-approved.