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copied!<p>You can't beat the insight of Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 Turing Award lecture, <a href="http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html" rel="noreferrer">"The Humble Programmer:"</a></p> <blockquote> <p>as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products. </p> <p>To put it in another way: as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society's ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means.</p> </blockquote> <p>and towards the end:</p> <blockquote> <p>As an aside I would like to insert a warning to those who identify the difficulty of the programming task with the struggle against the inadequacies of our current tools, because they might conclude that, once our tools will be much more adequate, programming will no longer be a problem. </p> <p>Programming will remain very difficult, because once we have freed ourselves from the circumstantial cumbersomeness, we will find ourselves free to tackle the problems that are now well beyond our programming capacity.</p> </blockquote> <p>The whole lecture is well worth reading.</p>

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