Dijkstra on why he believed programmers should stop using the term "bug"

That's nice, but originally they were actually bugs.

He's never had to report billable hours.

taking his exams must have been fun

Imagine trying to explain it to vibe-coders.

With fixed audio

I have a deep fatigue of all the jackasses with a need to make themselves feel self-important by lecturing people on not using the words everyone uses and understand well. What a retard.

"undocumented feature" was the meme some time ago.

This sounds like his own problem. Using the word "bug" is simply an homage to the words origin. If my house has bugs in it, I am certainly responsible for their presence.

Me when claude code makes a mistake

Yeah, no. It's a flaw. We call it a bug because it's something you didn't know about that is small and hard to find and root out. When we call someone "hysterical" we don't mean that he is acting like a woman.

40 years ago I was the one of the best students of one his former best students Henk S. I am proud to have retained his teachings and practicing them until today. These guys had a real Hauteur de vue we say in French.

That's very interesting. If I write something thinking it will do one thing, but it does something entirely different--error. But if I write something and does exactly what I expected, but doesn't do what the Business expects--I'll call that a bug.

This nice lady in the office next to me is Dutch, like me. Her code never have any bugs. She would smile, giggle a little and say: "Oh, that is a bugje that I still have to look after." As if bugs are little kitten instead of nasty cockroaches.

Ngl, upp until this point I've always assumed Dijkstra was Russian or maybe Polish based on the weird name but seeing this it's immediately obvious he is Dutch and it makes so much sense

playback speed 1.5x

when you have a job, you're gonna run into people who call it a jira or something, and it's straight up not worth the social or political currency to try to correct them when you could spend it on architecture issues or features instead.

Siri, show me an example of someone unbearably smug & patronizing & convinced of their superiority over every other carbon-based life form

From the guy who had an algorithm named after him known as “the greedy algorithm” he’s totally gangster.

He has a point there, though proving the correctness of a program normally takes so much effort that nobody does it almost never. It also requires that the requirements are complete, but a lot of "bugs" exist because they are almost never complete. I'm sure Djikstra would have been fired from any modern programming job for using too much time in ensuring the correctness of his code...

Richard Feynman didn't believe in brushing your teeth. Thomas Edison believed he could call the dead. Linus Pauling beleived Vit C cured Cancer and viruses. Great humans, still ultimately wrong.

Thanks for the algorithm, Dijkstra. But damn the autism is powerful in this guy.

This is technically correct, however, there are times where the error comes from the spec itself, so we call program error bugs, but what what do we call the other?

I know he was a brilliant computer scientist but wow, the charisma was amazing....🙄

The term bug comes from a story where an actual bug caused hardware failure of a computer. So you can make the case that bug would be more appropriate for hardware errors. But the term stuck and the meaning is clear. People don't use the term as a way to avoid responsibility.

Where I work we use the word "defect" rather than "bug".

@AlexTensor 🔥 🔥 🔥 🐛 🔥 🔥 🔥

We've known for a long time that they're "features" ...

What a miserable bastard

I find his request weird. 1) IME the term “bug” has never diminished its status as a programmer error. 2) “error” is a broader category than “bug”. So IMO in a twist of irony, calling bugs errors, is more likely to lead to the concerns he raises.

Well Watts S. Humphrey use to say that we should not call them Bugs, but time bombs so we care about the defects in the software.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. Edsger W. Dijkstra

Good god what a kill joy. Someone should tell him Programmers also should not try achieve philosophy by coding! It is a word to communicate "unwanted", not some deep and profound twist to relieve responsibility. Also TALK FUCKING FASTER!

@dark_axl I bet he was fun at parties

Autism is a hell of a drug.

Most wrong take