“Beauty Is Our Business”?

Note the carefully engineered punctuation in the title. The quotes indicate that the assertion therein contained is not mine; the question mark is there to indicate that I’m not sure I agree.

Though the quoted assertion may suggest it comes from some Association of Cosmeticians, I got it from the cover of the festschrift in honour of Edsger W. Dijkstra, the programming guru who died in 2002.

Dijkstra believed that

• programming should be like mathematics, and that
• beauty is the business of mathematics.

In his writings and in his lectures, Dijkstra held up mathematics as a prime example of the kind of beauty that he strived for in his own programming and that he found lacking in the work of those who program for pay.

Programming = Language + X

Suppose your are a beginner on the piano. You hear a piece of music that catches your fancy and borrow the score from the library. If the music is beyond your capabilities, you’ll know soon enough: if not right away on turning the cover page, then before you get to the end of the first few bars.

In programming, it’s different. There you can be busy for days or weeks, even months learning the ins and outs, say, of Java and its libraries. Flushed with the illusion of power that all this knowledge brings, you come across something that catches your fancy, say, write a program that solves Sudoku puzzles. Wouldn’t that be neat! Now that you know so much about this powerful and sophisticated programming language, what’s going to stop you? Even after weeks of thrashing around, you may not know what hit you.

Where Have All the Great Programmers Gone?

The twin theses of this essay are that the current educational environment militates against the discovery and nurturing of programming talent, in spite of what should be the crucial importance of great programmers. Moreover, even if a manager can get hold of a rare great programmer, it is not clear how she or he can be used. In this essay I contrast the current environment with the one in which the first great programmers were reared and consider what can be done.