ABSTRACT

In the famous Turing award lecture entitled “The Humble Programmer” delivered at the annual ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Conference, Edgars Dijkstra (1972) made the remarkable observation that computers had yet to solve a single problem —they had only introduced the new problem of learning to use them effectively. In this insightful essay (see https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361591), Dijkstra cites a num - ber of factors contributing to the problem. One factor, of course, is the rapidly increas ing size and complexity of programs. Another factor that had gone largely unnoticed was the fact that the tools and technologies being used determined to a large extent how programmers were thinking. Tools and technologies strongly influence our habits of thinking.