Comment Re:gratutitous complexification (Score 1) 432
Quite frankly Steve McConnell and Dijkstra were both proponents of a school of programming that was just as wrong in the 1970s as they are today. The only difference is today we have had an entire generation of programmers schooled in their wrong-headedness.
If you look at the work of Alan Kay, and the people at VPRI, they are striving to produce a complete computing system in 20k lines of code. Charles Moore & friends have complete chip design CAD and simulation systems running on real world hardware written in fewer lines (and have produced actual hardware using them). Dijkstra and McConnell are apologists for a status-quo which promotes ignorance rather than valuing understanding.
If you look at the work of Alan Kay, and the people at VPRI, they are striving to produce a complete computing system in 20k lines of code. Charles Moore & friends have complete chip design CAD and simulation systems running on real world hardware written in fewer lines (and have produced actual hardware using them). Dijkstra and McConnell are apologists for a status-quo which promotes ignorance rather than valuing understanding.
