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The Humble Programmer
Dijkstra's 1972 Turing Award lecture — the fullest statement of his conception of programming as a branch of applied mathematics requiring the specific intellectual virtue of knowing the limits of one's own skull.
"The Humble Programmer" is the lecture Dijkstra delivered on accepting the Turing Award in 1972, and it is the best single entry point to his thinking. The argument runs through a reconstruction of the first two decades of computing, a diagnosis of the software crisis of the late 1960s, and a proposal for a new discipline of programming grounded in mathematical reasoning rather than trial and error. The title's key word is humble, and Dijkstra's use of it is precise. The humility he prescribed was not self-deprecation; it was the specific intellectual virtue of knowing what you do not know and acting accordingly. The competent programmer, he wrote, "is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; he therefore approaches the programming task in full humility."
In The You On AI Field Guide
The lecture was delivered at a moment of crisis in the profession. Operating systems had been failing spectacularly. IBM's OS/360 had consumed