[HN Gopher] How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
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How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
Author : pcfwik
Score : 20 points
Date : 2025-03-11 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.virginia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.virginia.edu)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 1975, also surprisingly few conversations on this one. Here are
| the few with more than three comments:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776336 - Oct 2020 (73
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4926615 - Dec 2012 (67
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279260 - Mar 2011 (74
| comments)
|
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ - for this and many more writings
| by Dijkstra.
| sdwr wrote:
| I think the truth on display is that living inside an artificial
| system that:
|
| - is designed for you
|
| - never talks back
|
| - can be mastered
|
| selects for (and breeds!) a deep sense of arrogance and
| entitlement
| waterhouse wrote:
| > never talks back clang: error: linker command
| failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
| djaouen wrote:
| I think there is room for nuance. For example, it is true to say,
| "Programming requires intelligence." It is also unnecessary to
| say, "You can't program if you're dumb." One of these statements
| is productive and not insulting, the other isn't.
|
| Just my two cents.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Is that nuance? Or just politeness analysis of two semantically
| identical statements?
| recursive wrote:
| They don't seem exactly the same. I think there's a general
| sense that most people are in the middle. Neither intelligent
| nor dumb. Those are the outliers. It's not so bad to be in
| the middle.
| djaouen wrote:
| Maybe "nuance" isn't the right word.
|
| My point is, there are usually ways to phrase identical
| truths with which the writer does not intend to insult.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > For example, it is true to say, "Programming requires
| intelligence." It is also unnecessary to say, "You can't
| program if you're dumb."
|
| I promise if you get far along enough in your career you will
| realize this is very much not true, it's a thing people like to
| believe, but there are plenty of deeply stupid programmers out
| there with long, annoying careers.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I feel like the definition of "stupid" here is important.
|
| There are a lot of incredibly clever programmers out there
| who will construct intricate webs of abstracted hell because
| they are clever. These guys are mostly not "stupid". One of
| my colleagues working on one of these code bases with me
| described it as "very smart people doing very stupid things".
|
| And yes, they all have long and annoying careers.
|
| Contrast this with the swathes of what I would characterise
| as "rat cunning" programmers who were everywhere during the
| Y2K crisis. They knew just enough to be dangerous, did some
| truly stupid things and disappeared from the programming
| world afterwards. The unkind might say they all turned into
| systems architects and project managers.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| My observation is that there's likely a sweet spot. Though
| this is a multidimensional vector so it's not one sweet spot.
|
| A programmer can find a niche where their skill has value for
| a long period of time, even if their situation (mental
| flexibility, willingness to learn, etc.) precludes exiting
| the niche. It can be a challenge to work with someone like
| that if you have to interface to them and their approach is
| to pull you all the way over to where they are.
|
| ... but sometimes that's how it is. And I've seen plenty of
| smart programmers smother their ability to provide value for
| real people under analysis paralysis while the "stupid"
| programmers bull-charge in with the first approach they can
| think of and write some ugly, stupid, spaghetti, _working_
| tools.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| "For instance: with respect to COBOL you can really do only one
| of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not
| exist"
|
| A better question might be, how should you proceed when your
| truth does not want to be heard?
| immibis wrote:
| Flee the country before it's too late.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| As a self-taught programmer, I have just "experienced" Dijkstra
| through various tidbits like this[1], and from the bits I've read
| he comes across as a bit of an pompous asshat. However strong
| opinions are a fertile ground for discussion, so I assume it's a
| deliberate strategy and can see why he keeps getting mentioned.
|
| That said, I found this one particularly interesting given the
| recent rise of LLMs:
|
| _Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are
| intrinsically doomed to fail._
|
| I assume he's referring to languages like COBOL and SQL, the
| latter still going strong, but I can't help but think that this
| part will change a lot in the coming decades.
|
| Sure we'll likely still have some intermediary language with
| strong syntax and similar, just like how LLVM, C# and similar
| have their IL, but it's hard to think the majority of the
| programming is done typing in regular programming languages like
| JavaScript, C++ or similar in 2050.
|
| [1]: I have of course learned about his algorithm
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The former is also still going strong; the US Social Security
| Administration has sixty million lines of the stuff (as well as
| half of banks and approximately 80% of card transactions).
|
| COBOL, at this point, has outlived Dijkstra and is poised to be
| a language-in-use for longer than he was a human-in-breathing.
| So I suspect he missed the mark on that one.
|
| (I think, personally, we hackers have a bad habit of deciding a
| language that doesn't fit our favorite problem domains is a bad
| language. There are reasons, other than simple inertia, that
| COBOL sticks around in places where the main task is turning
| written laws into computer code...).
| ambicapter wrote:
| > In the good old days physicists repeated each other's
| experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so
| that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
|
| This is pretty wild when you think about it. I wouldn't expect a
| lab to check another lab's work by re-writing their code
| (although, I'd love to hear some examples!), but if you don't,
| you're really powerless against whatever bugs they wrote into
| their scientific code.
| watwut wrote:
| You do not need to reimplement software to test it.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The submitter really should have waited on this a bit longer. The
| 50th anniversary of this essay is June 18 but submitting it again
| then would be considered a [dupe].
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| How did Dijkstra intend this to be received? I started reading
| this at face value and was nodding along until the comments on
| BASIC programmers being "mentally mutilated and "use of COBOL
| cripples the mind" which seem more like he was trolling?
|
| That said, this one really is a truth: "Simplicity is
| prerequisite for reliability."
|
| And this one is no longer true since LLMs: "Projects promoting
| programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to
| fail."
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There are other ways to attain reliability. Redundancy is one.
|
| There is nothing simple about the way the Internet works but it
| continues to be proven robust against everything from temporary
| outage to nation-state revolution.
| loco5niner wrote:
| > And this one is no longer true since LLMs: "Projects
| promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically
| doomed to fail."
|
| Not convinced that this is no longer true... yet
| margalabargala wrote:
| Doesn't your addition of a "yet" imply the parent is correct?
| We don't need to have a working counterexample in existence
| for that "truth" to be wrong, we just need to see that such a
| project is not "intrinsically doomed to fail".
|
| Twenty years ago such projects were intrinsically doomed to
| fail. Today, they are on the cusp of not failing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years
| old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application
| you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too
| expensive to use.
|
| We're gonna be stuck with cpp for at least a thousand years
| aren't we.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I'm doing my part, still keeping C++ systems alive so the next
| generation can see the horrors created by our predecessors. At
| least this particular program doesn't have the same problems as
| the last one I worked on, where some genius decided to make
| their own shared_ptr and did it wrong among many other bizarre
| choices.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| C++ will outlive all of us.
|
| In general, you can assume that any technology or standard
| which had significant market share during a growth period will
| have, at the very least, a long tail of continued use for the
| foreseeable future. Stuff that's in use and works doesn't get
| replaced unless the alternatives beat out the switching cost.
|
| For another example, I typed this comment on a QWERTY keyboard.
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