E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Interview Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Austin, 04-03-1985

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Interview Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Austin, 04–03–1985<br>&copy;Rogier F. van Vlissingen

Biographical Details

1930: Born in Rotterdam, Holland<br>1948–1956: Studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Leyden<br>1952–1962: Worked at the Mathematical Center In Amsterdam—first ever person on

payroll as programmer 1957: Married—Justice of the peace would not accept programmer as profession for

the records, so theoretical physicist used instead. 1962–1973: Professor of Mathematics at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Holland<br>1973–1984: Burroughs Research Fellow and Professor Extraordinarius at Eindhoven—

"Burroughs' smallest research lab was my study." 1984: Professor and Schlumberger Centennial Chair in computer sciences at the

University of Texas at Austin.

Given some of the drastic statements that you have made about the quality of software, is anything changing, are we progressing to better products?

That depends, over the last fifteen years the gap between computing science and our best industries and computing practice in industry has widened. Very much. Mainly due to the fact that computing science at the universities has made such progress. Now industry is employing younger staff that has had a much better training than in the past. Over the years I have lectured on programming over the world and the major reaction from the audience was usually: "What a pity my boss is not here." That is a very sad comment, but the moral of the story is that if industrial practice suffers it is largely due to the conservatism, technical incompetence, of the managers of those projects. If however the internal organization and hierarchy of industrial programming organizations can be changed, there is room for great progress. And I think it will change, because the pressure from below becomes stronger and stronger.

In practice it often appears that pressures of production reward clever programming over good programming: how are we progressing in making the case that good programming is also cost effective?

Well, it has been said over and over again that the tremendous cost of programming is caused by the fact that it is done by cheap labor, which makes it very expensive, and secondly that people rush into coding. One of the things people learn in colleges nowadays is to think first; that makes the development more cost effective. I know of at least one software house in France, and there may be more because this story is already a number of years old, where it is a firm rule of the house, that for whatever software they are committed to deliver, coding is not allowed to start before seventy percent of the scheduled time has elapsed. So if after nine months a project team reports to their boss that they want to start coding, he will ask: "Are you sure there is nothing else to do?" If they say yes, they will be told that the product will ship in three months. That company is highly successful.

There is a perception that the spread of personal computers is bringing with it a spread of alleged computer literacy. The 'PC revolution' is thought to ready the lay user more for computer based solutions and should thus help the progress of computer use in corporations. Is there any substance to this perception or is this development maybe just muddying the water?

Two comments to this question. One comment is that your view of industrial programs as pointed out in the question is narrow. There are all sorts of programs that hardly have users, if you think of a telephone exchange, or digital controls in cars or airplanes. As to the programming products that are used by people, I hardly have first hand experience, my impression is that an enormous amount of user time is wasted figuring out what the system does and how to control it, which is the consequence of two sorts of happenings. First of all that the designers have failed to keep the interface of a system as simple as possible—which is a challenge; but as soon as you realize that the main challenge of computer science is how not to get lost in the complexities of their own making, it is quite clear that this is a major task. Secondly, the scene is very much burdened by the fact that a large fraction of the people involved are functionally illiterate; particularly in the United States.

Do you really feel that this is more the case here than in Holland?

Oh yes. In Europe a much larger fraction of the populationcan write. People in America have really suffered from the combination of TV, which makes reading superfluous, and the telephone. A few years ago I was at CalTech and that is a hiqh quality place and everybody recommends it because the students are so bright. A graduate confessed to me—no he did not confess, he just stated it, that he did not care about his writing, since he was preparing himself for an industrial career. Poor industry!

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