E.W.Dijkstra: Trip report to USSR in September of 1976
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/tran ... WD584.html
Интересно послушать мнение аксакалов, насколько адекванто он оценивает состояние науки в СССР в то время:
It is undoubtedly true that I observed a strongly mathematical approach to computing science, but it seemed to me to be mathematics of the wrong kind. Very pompous, with Roman, Greek and Gothic alphabets —Andrej complained about the "indexomania" in his country— and void of any simplicity or elegance. A "machine" is at least a ten-tuple, and all their work seems soaked with more and more elaborate computational models. I remember the man who proudly told us that his computational model distinguished between no fewer than five (!) different kinds of store. In short, it seems all highly ineffective. I got two explicit indications, that mathematical elegance is not regarded as very important (a decadent capitalistic luxury?). It will take a long time before they will discover that in computing science, elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a matter of life and death.
Я, кстати, у вышеупомянутого профессора Jack T. Schwarz писал мастер-тезиз, но ничего тогда не знал про егопоездки в СССР. Он, конечно, интересный и уникальный язык придумал - SETL. Занятно, что в России к нему проявили такой интерес.I was surprised by the susceptibility —or should I say: vulnerability?— to foreign (primarily American) influences. Jack T. Schwarz was touring the USSR for the n-th time in order to keep the Russians up to date on the latest developments of SETL. (Was this part of some sort of Helsinki treaty between the USA and the USSR?) On the one hand I know that many people have grave doubts about the whole SETL-project (and I know some of the reasons), on the other hand it was strange —nearly alarming— to see that in the USSR Schwarz was taken absolutely seriously. In Leningrad I discovered that they had been misguided enough to invest God knows how much in an implementation of.... ALGOL 68 for the Russian 360! In Novosibirsk a group had recently embarked on automatic program verification etc., very much in the line of London c.s., without any tangible justification for the hope that they should do any better. During our lunch with Marchuk, the latter asked our comments after he had explained why computing science in his opinion was such an important field, an explanation that was no more than a reiteration of the Artificial Intelligence hopes!
