Comment by selridge

2 days ago

Dijkstra also said no one should be debugging and yet here we are.

He's not wrong about the problems of natural language YET HERE ARE. That would, I think, cause a sensible engineer to start poking at the predicate instead of announcing that the foregone conclusion is near.

We should take seriously the possibility that this isn't going to be in a retrenchment which bestows a nice little atta boy sticker on all the folks who said I told you so.

6 comments

selridge

godelski 2 days ago

  > Dijkstra also said no one should be debugging

Given how you're implying things, you're grossly misrepresenting what he said. You've either been misled or misread. He was advocating for the adoption and development of provably correct programming.

Interestingly I think his "gospel" is only more meaningful today.

  | Apparently, many programmers derive the major part of their intellectual satisfaction and professional excitement from not quite understanding what they are doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most under-nourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic, and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineers, who are secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks they take in their daring irresponsibility. They revel in the puzzles posed by the task of debugging. They defend —by appealing to all sorts of supposed Laws of Nature— the right of existence of their program bugs, because they are so attached to them: without the bugs, they feel, programming would no longer be what is used to be! (In the latter feeling I think —if I may say so— that they are quite correct.)

  | A program can be regarded as an (abstract) mechanism embodying as such the design of all computations that can possibly be evoked by it. How do we convince ourselves that this design is correct, i.e. that all these computations will display the desired properties? A naive answer to this question is "Well, try them all.", but this answer is too naive, because even for a simple program on the fastest machine such an experiment is apt to take millions of years. So, exhaustive testing is absolutely out of the question.

  | But as long as we regard the mechanism as a black box, testing is the only thing we can do. The unescapable conclusion is that we cannot afford to regard the mechanism as a black box

I think it's worth reading in full

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288...

selridge 2 days ago
>no one should be debugging
He literally said those exact words out loud from the audience during a job talk.
And yeah, the total aim and the reason why he might just blurt that out is because a lot of the frustration and esprit de corps of programming is held up in writing software that's more a guess about behavior than something provably correct. Perhaps we all ought to be writing provably correct software and never debugging as a result. We don't. But perhaps we ought to. We don't.
Is control via natural language a doomed effort? Perhaps, but I'd be cautious rather than confident about predicting that.
- godelski 1 day ago
  
  > He literally said those exact words out loud from the audience during a job talk.
  Yes, I even provided the source...
  Unfortunately despite being able to provide a summary I'm unable to actually read it for you. You'll actually need to read the whole thing and interpret it. You have a big leg up with my summary but being literate or not is up to you. As for me, I'm not going to argue with someone who chooses not to read
  
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