Perfecting Oneself Is As Much Unlearning As

In Passing I Draw Attention To Another English Expression Which Often Occurs In Dutch Texts: "the Real World". In Dutch - And I Am Afraid Not In Dutch Alone - Its Usage Is Almost Always A Symptom Of A Violent Anti-intellectualism.

When We Had No Computers, We Had No Programming Problem Either. When We Had A Few Computers, We Had A Mild Programming Problem. Confronted With Machines A Million Times As Powerful, We Are Faced With A Gigantic Programming Problem.

It Is Not The Task Of The University To Offer What Society Asks For, But To Give What Society Needs.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

… What Society Overwhelmingly Asks For Is Snake Oil. Of Course, The Snake Oil Has The Most Impressive Names — Otherwise You Would Be Selling Nothing — Like “structured Analysis And Design”, “software Engineering”, “maturity Models”, “management Information Systems”, “integrated Project Support Environments” “object Orientation” And “business Process Re-engineering”.