Here’s Edsger Dijkstra discussing the birth of the use of axiomatics in computer science – the start of “formal methods” research. What’s striking is the assumed choice between “axiomatic” and “mechanistic” as if there was no other way. In a later note he writes: And now we are back at our old dilemma. Either we [...]
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Here’s Dijkstra He [Perlis] published a very obnoxious paper arguing against a mathematical approach to programming cite Here’s the paper by De Millo, Lipton and Perlis. It starts as follows: Many people have argued that computer programming should strive to become more like mathematics. Maybe so, but not in the way they seem to think. [...]