Dec 14, 2009 04:57
"The first rule of the game is that in this discussion we must regard science as if it were an end in itself. We both know that it never is, yet we must do 'as if', because, whatever the ends may be, you will never get any agreement on them. (At an American computer conference a few years ago, the keynote speaker explained that computing science was very important because only computing science would enable the USA to maintain its technological superiority in the face of the Japanese threat. Some years later, at a computer conference in Tokyo, the keynote speaker explained that computing science was very important, because only computing science could free Japan from the American technological supremacy. So there you are!)"
"This very morning I read a long paper by A.Endres (IBM, Böblingen) who seemed to suggest that our profession has now evolved to the stage in which the design of new programs has become less important than learning to live with the existing ones."
"Computing practice on the average has dug itself into a hole of which it does not see how to come out again; by way of consolation it deceives itself by praising the hole for the protection it gives."
Oh, Dijkstra.