So, there are two ways to do things, an easy way and a hard way. Once you've done it the easy way, it's probably a lot easier to cover up the traces and make it look like you did it the hard way.

And a guy who is famous both for being incredibly clever and for being rather arrogant and insecure told all his competitors that they were incompetent if they didn't do it the hard way.

Programming is a form of mathematics. Maths papers are terse and beautiful and look as though they have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus.

But you don't see the days of hacking through examples and crazy leaps of intuition (that are almost always wrong) in the finished paper, because the mathematician removes them from the story in order to leave an argument that is easy to verify.

I am not saying that Dijkstra couldn't do things the hard way. I would be amazed if his best stuff was done the hard way.