To gain context into Dijkstra's response, it may be worth reading it [0]. Here's the conclusion of his response:
> In short, the article is a progress report on a valid research effort but suffers badly from aggressive overselling of its significance, long before convincing results have been reached. This is the more regrettable as it has been published by way of Turing Award Lecture.
Regarding "He tried to destroy it." Dijkstra is known, and often criticized by others, for his hyperbole. Perhaps instead of imitating this heavily criticized aspect of his, you could tone down your rhetoric and actually create an argument rather than try to dismiss someone (and all their work) for one thing you disagree with.
[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
Regardless, your original comment made two absurd claims:
1. Dijkstra attacked the paper that inspired Haskell and everything else that currently exists in FP. He tried to destroy it. [emphasis added]
Which is what my quote of Dijkstra's actual statements was meant to rebut. He did not try to destroy it. He criticized it, and some of his criticism may have been wrong then, and I'd say is wrong now (with greater understanding of the ideas Backus was presenting), but he did not try to destroy it.
2. He should be a footnote in history.
Another absurd position. Because of one response (and if you wanted to you can probably find a number of others) exaggerated beyond reason ("He tried to destroy it."), you want to dismiss some 50 years of work.
"He tried to destroy it" is too strong. I will back down from that.
And I 100% agree. Thinking that functional programming solves all problems is a fundamental misunderstanding of computation.
The first thing that opened my eyes to the overselling of FP as a panacea was reading Leslie Lamport’s work, specifically Computation and State Machines: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/state-machine.pdf. Specifically, in Section 3: Programs as State Machines, he demonstrates how the same algorithm for computing factorials can be implemented via mutation or recursion.
With TLA+, Lamport also showed that mutation and state can be reasoned about mathematically, contrary to the central claim of functional programming purists.
The point is simple: functional programming doesn’t in any way _inherently_ help with correctly implementing programs. The fact that FP is currently in vogue is simply another example of how humans don’t require any evidence of anything at all before following a belief system blindly.
FP does prevent certain classes of mistakes from happening, i.e. unintentional bugs due to mutation creating implicit state machines. But preventing bugs and aiding in correctness aren’t exactly the same thing.
While Dijkstra's criticism probably does deserve to be called an "attack", the resulting exchange between him and Backus was highly thought-provoking and entertaining.
https://github.com/jiahao/backus-dijkstra-letters-1979/
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
> He should be a footnote in history.
Please read the posted article, and educate yourself on his historical significance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Pioneering_...
There will always be someone in every Hacker News comment section to whine like a baby. Every topic, every thread. Someone will whine.