> It is not unusual —although a mistake— to consider the programmer's task to be the production of programs. (One finds terms such as "software manufacturing", proposals to measure programmer productivity by the number of lines of code produced per month etc., although I have never seen the suggestion to measure composer productivity by the number of notes, monthly scribbled on his score!).
47 years later, a lot of people still measure programming productivity by LOCs. Hell, even major freelance marketplaces try to track your every billed second by taking screenshots of your desktop or webcam "just to make sure you're working".
Well that's some dystopian nightmare stuff I had no idea was happening.
EDIT: refine quote and add italics
This was real eye opening for me when I did contract/consultant work, even as a 1099. I can understand the enterprise, butts in the seat model of developers being on retainer but for contracting houses I don't get it.
If developers don't want to be bound by these metrics they need to get better at forcing the client into contracts for deliverables with clearly defined acceptance criteria. Also, it seems to me that the best way to get proficient and creating and updating these contracts is by having to work twice as long to deliver a work product as was initially estimated.
Wow, that would definitely trigger my neurosis into a full-blown nervous breakdown. Does reading e-mail count as "working"? Does configuring environment variables and adding printers count as "working"? Does reading documentation count as "working"? And don't you dare stop by and interrupt me with a "quick question"...
But, there's a lot of talk about it online. Google for "upwork time tracking" and similar queries and you'll find heaps of people complaining. Upwork is just 1 marketplace that has apps like that.
Think of that as a very clear way to indicate that you shouldn't work for them if you have a choice. Pity those who have no other options.
> His fundamental contributions cover diverse areas of computing science, including compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, programming paradigm and methodology, programming language research, program design, program development, program verification, software engineering principles, graph algorithms, and philosophical foundations of computer programming and computer science. Many of his papers are the source of new research areas. Several concepts and problems that are now standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra or bear names coined by him.
In fact, I'd wager someone already came up with it somewhere before Dijkstra did, put it in the code (or, well, on the punch card), and quietly went home, happy about a good day's work.
Dijkstra just was the first one to publish it :-)
His true contributions were, IMO:
* Being the first tech blogger[0] (handwritten!)
* Teaching people to use while/for instead of goto
* Pioneering mathematically verified algorithm derivation
[0] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/indexChron.html - I'm calling it a blog because both the median length and the frequency of publishing is a lot more like blogging than anything else. I'm not aware of other people doing this as much in that day and age (but I'm probably wrong)
It's not a web log (for which “blog” is short) if it's not on the web.
In 1971? I seriously doubt that...
>[people] who identify the programmer's competence with a thorough knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of one or more of the baroque tools into which modern programming languages and systems have degenerated
This, however, is as valid as ever...
Today we have more books than all those FORTRAN and ALGOL and COBOL books combined just for a single language, like Python or Ruby.
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW...
From his Wikipedia page [1]:
> Dijkstra never wrote his articles using a computer. He preferred to rely on his typewriter and later on his Montblanc pen. Dijkstra's favorite writing instrument was the Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pen.
"With the advent of what is called "large scale integration" (being a term from the computer field, its acronym LSI is better known!) it seems to become technically feasible to build machines more like "clouds of arithmetic units" with information processing activities going on simultaneously all over the place, for shorter periods of time even independently of each other. Programming for such machines will pose completely different trade-off problems: one will be willing to invest in potentially useful computing activity before its actual usefulness has been established, all for the sake of speeding up the whole computation. But although I know such machines may be coming, I shall not touch these problems for the following reasons. First, as far as general purpose applications are concerned, I have my doubts about the effectiveness with which such forms of parallelism can ever be exploited. Second —and that is the most important consideration— parallel programming is an order of magnitude more difficult than sequential programming."
Also, the first mention of "cloud", although with a different meaning.
Interesting that they did not seem to want to attract people who just enjoy programming..