I've always enjoyed reading Dijkstra
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html.
He said of PL/I:
"Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention
PL/1, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of
a frightening size and complexity. Using PL/1 must be like flying a
plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the
cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs
firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the
programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our
intellectual control."
Wow, I wonder what he thought of C++?
On 24/01/2014 8:47 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
John von Neumann on the baroque:
As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or
still more, if it is a second and third generation only indirectly
inspired from ideas coming from 'reality', it is beset with very grave
dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more
purely l'art pour l'art. This need not be bad, if the field is
surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical
connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with
an exceptionally well-developed taste.
But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the
line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source,
will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the
discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and
complexities.
In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or
after much 'abstract' inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger
of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical; when
it shows signs of becoming baroque the danger signal is up. It would
be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the
baroque and the very high baroque, but this would be too technical.
In any event, whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy seems to
me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of
more or less directly empirical ideas. I am convinced that this is a
necessary condition to conserve the freshness and the vitality of the
subject, and that this will remain so in the future.
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