That's a famous quote and age might have mellowed him. But he was not like that at all in person with his students. He did insist that one be precise with ones words.
The origin of the quote may have more to do with cultural differences between the Dutch and Americans.
That's a great point which never occurred to me about Dijkstra, even though I knew where he came from. My father in law used to like this joke: "He was Dutch and behaved as such."
Some seem to think that math is somehow above plumbing, but modern society couldn't exist without both, and I'd argue that modern plumbing is more critical to our health and well being than modern math.
The plumber knows how many inches per foot the pipe has to drop in order for the poop to flow away and not get stuck in the pipe. It's easy enough to either not drop it enough and everything gets stuck or for it to drop too much and the water flows away but the poop stays in place. And they're the ones that actually make it happen and their clients really do care about that in the end. Without knowing this the plumber is nothing. They don't necessarily need to know they why and especially don't need to calculate it out!
Some mathematician can probably calculate that properly. Some mathematician probably first did calculate that out to prove it. I'm not entirely certain that a mathematician was the reason that we know what drop we need. A lot of things in "real life" were "empirically discovered" and used and done for centuries before a mathematician proved it.
Exceptions prove the rule, like when we calculate(d) things out for space travel before ever attempting it ;)
I’d want to see an example of Dijkstra’s “arrogance” that wasn’t justified.
The “truths that might hurt” essay is a great example. Yeah, the truth hurts for many people. People don’t like being called out on their folly, particularly if it’s something they don’t personally control. That Durant make it “arrogant” to point it out.
Also, Alan Kaye is overrated. Object orientation is one of those painful truths.
Object orientation is a great tool and I wouldn't be without it. But like all tools it has to be applied in the right way in the appropriate situation and is not universally useful.
Classic object orientation is wrong. It conflates things that shouldn’t be conflated.
Look at Rust, Haskell, Go, Elm, Purescript, or Idris. All of them have something like traits or interfaces, and don’t need the rest of the badly designed OO machinery.
OO was basically a wrong turn that was taken some time after the development of CLU. It appealed to some people intuitively - including me, I implemented and sold a commercial OO language product in the early 90s - but it was always bad technically.
I'm less concerned about "justified" and more about "useful". If you behave offensively to everyone around you, then you have become your own worst enemy in the war of ideas.
Ignaz Semmelweis was right. He also died in an asylum, having utterly failed to convince doctors to wash their hands between patients.
What do you think Semmelweis could have done differently, that actually could have worked?
The assumption in what you’re saying is that it’s possible to convince ignorant, recalcitrant, authority-rejecting people to change their behavior. That’s great! Could you sketch an approach to get people to seriously try to solve global warming, then? No? How about fascism? No? So, what is your point, exactly?
Well, he could have done what Pasteur or Koch did and become a pivotal figure in inventing germ theory.
He could also have just lived out his life in obscurity and made things a little better in his hospital, doing what he could and quietly regretting that he couldn't change everyone's mind, until the emergence of germ theory.
Instead, he got beaten to death by asylum guards after annoying and alienating everyone around him. That seems like a very obvious bad ending to me.
I can't sketch out an approach to make the entire global population to listen to you. I can, however, warn you that being a gigantic douchebag to all your colleagues will not make them take your proposals seriously.
No, it is not my sentiment nor am i being censorious.
It can be inferred from Kay's own words. He probably was just poking fun in a tongue-in-cheek manner often seen amongst larger-than-life figures.
John Backus called Edsger Dijkstra arrogant since the latter was highly critical of the former's research in functional programming (not the substance but the hyping). Kay was probably riffing off of that.
The problem is that a lot of noobs/kids/oldies-who-should-know-better often dismiss(!) Dijkstra's work because of this silly quote. Thus in this case, a "nice story" is actually an obstacle to people reading Dijkstra.
People only focus on that phrase since it makes a nice "talking point" and ignore all the other interesting things from Kay's talk. For example; i never knew that most of Euler's proofs were wrong w.r.t. rigorous approach as defined today!
> It can be inferred from Kay's own words. He probably was just poking fun in a tongue-in-cheek manner often seen amongst larger-than-life figures.
...is that not obvious from the original quote? Maybe it's a cultural difference (I'm from Ireland), but that's how I've always interpreted and it's never occurred to me that people took it seriously or as anything other than tongue in cheek.
The problem is with folks who don't know/have never read (seriously that is) Dijkstra.
For example, every time somebody posts something about Dijkstra on HN/etc. somebody will trot out this silly quote and then others pile on (since it requires no effort) and derail any interesting conversation.
It is human nature to have an opinion on everything and mediocrity often takes great pleasure in tearing down the greats (i mean the true ones) in order to soothe their own egos (since they know they don't measure up) i.e. "see? the great one is as flawed/mundane as us and i am showing him up".
And Dijkstra was Dutch who are famously known to be blunt which is often perceived as arrogance by others :-)
The quote makes much more sense as an in-joke between two like-minded people, because Alan Kay isn't exactly humble himself nor does he avoid provocative statements.
And speaking as a Dutch man, given the kind of humor we have I'm pretty certain Dijkstra appreciated a good roast like that too.
Have seen that presentation, but that still does not give the full context. At least, I don't think it is obvious from the video alone whether this remark was a friendly jab between friends, or whether it was a stereotypical vicious academic back-and-forth between to big names in a field.
