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The Humble Programmer

Authors: Edsger W. Dijkstra

Published: 1972 (Journal Paper)

Source: Communications of the ACM

DOI: 10.1145/355604.361591

Summary

Dijkstr argues that the programmer's job is an intellectual challenge of the highest order, and that genuine mastery requires humility about the limits of human reasoning. He advocates structured programming and formal correctness arguments as the only reliable path to trustworthy software.

Abstract

Tags

  • Software engineering

  • Structured programming

  • Program correctness

  • Software quality

  • Programming methodology