Essays on the Nature and Role of Mathematical Elegance by Edsger Dijkstra (1977)
cs.utexas.edu
cs.utexas.edu
Here, the noun "elegance" should be understood in the sense of the second meaning of "elegant", as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th Edition, 1976): "ingeniously simple and effective".
we shall stress that in sophisticated designs, elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a factor that often decides between success and failure.
Everyone playing around with AI today, needs to read, understand, reflect and assimilate the advice given in EWD619 ;-)
I also observe a widespread underestimation of what can be achieved by thinking properly, and sometimes an unwillingness to admit that, for certain goals, proper thinking is an indispensable prerequisite, an unwillingness of which a sad waste of effort, and ultimately, undeniable failure are the certain results.
I regard the obvious consequences of these attitudes and assumptions as regrettable. We have surrounded ourselves by arteifacts of needlessly clumsy designs, which make them cumbersome to develop and to maintain, and dangerous to rely upon; nevertheless they are relied upon, partly because we have the feeling that we have no choice, partly -- and that is where I protest -- their imperfections have been raised to the status of a Law of Nature. Secondly we observe -- mainly, but not exclusively, under the auspices of that branch of human activity and aspiration called "Artificial Intelligence" -- a great amount of research and development effort spent on trying to reduce the need for (what I am now forced to call) Natural Intelligence; I have reasons to expect these efforts to be in vain. Thirdly, we see our educational systems affected: they are getting geared to "Otto Normalverbraucher" [trans. Average Person] to the extent that it is now regarded as an indecency to require from a university graduate that he expresses himself adequately.
The rise of "Artificial Intelligence" today does not preclude the necessity of training our "Natural Intelligence" to think clearly and simply i.e. elegantly, in our problem-solving endeavours. None of the bazillion tools/techniques/methodologies (eg. crazy agentic loops, humongous prompt chaining, bloated codebases etc.) hoisted upon us to interface with AI is a substitute for thinking. If anything, simplicity, precision, formal methods, managed abstractions, separation of concerns are more vital today in the age of AI.