A great essay

Today Slashdot had a story on Dijkstra's essay. I started to read it casually during my lunch. After reading 30 pages of handwritten text, I was left awestruck. Some of the points made by Dijkstra in this essay are no short of epiphanies. And the fact that, the prose is 20 years old, feels you with respect for the vision Dijkstra had. If you are anyway related to Software engineering, this essay is a must read.

Here are my favorite snippets:

... As the economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot" ....

... The practice is pervaded by the reassuring illusion that programs are just devices like any others, the only difference admitted being that their manufacturer might require a new type of craftsmen, viz. programmers. From there it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month"....

... Unfathomed misunderstanding is further revealed by the term "software maintenance", as a result of which many people continue to believe that programs - and even programming languages themselves - are subject to wear and tear....