At the 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Edsger Dijkstra delivered a paper titled "The Humble Programmer." He argued that most of programming is an attempt to compensate for the strictly limited size of our skulls. The people who are best at programming are the people who realize how small their brains are. They are humble. The people who are the worst at programming are the people who refuse to accept the fact that their brains aren't equal to the task. Their egos keep them from being great programmers. The more you learn to compensate for your small brain, the better a programmer you'll be. The more humble you are, the faster you'll improve.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Humble Programmer
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I agree with you.
I would also like to add that the concept of abstraction (whether in modular or object-oriented programming) is just a means to break the complex problem into small and simple tasks that most people can understand.
If one's brain wasn't limited, he would be able to write any program as one straight piece of code.
Post a Comment