A word of welcome
Citation for published version (APA):Dijkstra, E. W. (1981). A word of welcome. Science of Computer Programming, 1(1-2), 3-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-6423(81)90003-4
DOI:
10.1016/0167-6423(81)90003-4
Document status and date: Published: 01/01/1981 Document Version:
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Science of Computer Programming 1 ( 198 1) 3-4 North-Holland Publishing Company
A WORD OF WELCOME
Judged by the age of dedicated journals, Computjng Science is now more than 25 years old. It would even be a mature science, if judged by the number of journans devoted to it: by now this number is SO large that the practising computing scientist
can hardly suppress a shudder at the though: of yet (3ne more journal to browse through. Why, then, do I welcome the appearance of “Science of Computer Programming”? The shortest answer is that this one might be worth reading, but
that is not the full story.
Being programmable is the automatic computer’s outstanding characteristic and, accordingly, programming is computing’s central activity. It is the core of the *whole topic. Amazingly enough, for more than 25 years we have had no journal specifically devoted to it: no journal, no special interest group, ;10 conference, no nothing! This absence would be defensible if programming were trivial and we could all do it well, but this is not the case. (Who doubts this statement should ask his colleagues to design a program for the Binary Search,) It is not hard to argue that the appearance of “Science of Computer Programming” is overdue.
Rut I don’t think it could have appeared much earlier. Peter Naur was the f&t to complain to me about the absence of ‘program literature’, ix. published programs that could be read a-d studied like any other scientific article and that would set a standard; Tony I-Ioare was the second one to voice that complaint to me. This was many years ago, but even then a program of some sophistication was such a compact deposit of its author’s intellectual labour that its presentation in an enlightening manner was a major problem. Yet, mutual enlightenment is what forges scientific communities!
A decade of work under the banner af ‘programming methodology’ has changed the situation and justifies so,me confidence that we have reached the stage in which we can begin to communicate programs and their development for the enlighten- ment of our colleagues.
“Science of Computer Programming” also has a calling beyond the co,mmunity of our closest colleagues. It should help e,ld the current state of affairs in which managers see programming primarily as a management problem because thzy cannot manage it, in which electronic engineers don’t see the problem and in which mathematicians ignore it. “‘Science of Computer Programming” faces the challenge of showing the rld at large that, concerning programming, there is far more meets the eye. 11 by itself, that challenge would already be worth this new _$u (which, I trust, will not adopt the silly corPvention of switching to a s
font as soon as text ).
4 A word’
of weicome
Rx Y§cience
