The excitement of not knowing what you’re doing

The following excerpt is a quote from Edsgar Dijkstra.

I think it was in 1970 that I gave my first talk in a foreign country on the design of programs that you could actually control and prove were correct. … The talk fell completely on its face. … The programmers didn’t like the idea at all because it deprived them of the intellectual excitement of not quite understanding what they were doing. They liked the challenge of chasing the bugs.

Taken from Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists. Emphasis added.

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