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https://www.ivorcatt.org/icrutrecht82.htm Trip
report E.W.Dijkstra, Utrecht 30 Sep. - 1 Oct. 1982 This was
a very short trip: I left Eindhoven on Thursday morning at 8:00 and returned
the next day at 17:20. The occasion was a two-day seminar on "The
software crisis", jointly organized by The Royal Institute of Engineers
and the Dutch Computer Society. I was the second speaker and one of the
members of the panel whose discussion closed the seminar. In particular the
second capacity was a reason to attend the whole seminar, which was not
exciting. Depressing would also be a quite adequate term. This
was not a disappointment, for I went with suitably low expectations: the
organizers had already told me that "in view of the topic" they
were not heading for a scientific level! And indeed, they reached their goal. One
view regards programming primarily as producing lines of code --for the
latter, one of the speakers seriously used the hilarious acronym LOC!--;
another view regards programming primarily as preventing an otherwise
unmanageable complexity from emerging. The first view is too superficial to
be helpful: it is like equating the study of a book with character
recognition and the turning of the pages. It was however the one adhered to
by many a speaker. I
enjoyed myself thanks to the presence of C.Bron, S.D.Swierstra (who moderated the panel discussion) and B.Waumans, people I know for years but whom I encounter
only rarely. The
highlight, however, was being introduced to Mr. Ivor Catt, whom I
had never met in person, though I knew very well who he was. By virtue of his involvement,
Catt knows all the ins and outs of one of the major scientific scandals of
the last 15 years, viz. the systematic suppression in the world of
electronics of all publications about the phenomenon of the so-called glitch
and its ramifications. Part of Catt has turned to the study of what one might
call the sociology of science or the scientific establishment's mechanisms
for the rejection of novel results. The story how once --on false accusations
made at a secret meeting-- he had got immediate notice because it was thought
mandatory that no one in the company, nor any of the company's --mostly
military-- customers, should know of the glitch was typical. (In
EWD837 I mentioned Melliar-Smith's lecture on the
fault-tolerant operating system designed for "flight control". One
of the things it has been designed to capture is a malfunctioning caused by a
glitch. In order to estimate the MTBF of the whole system, its designers
needed to know the likelihood of a glitch, a figure the hardware designers
have to provide. Today I heard that the electronic engineers of Bendix --the
company manufacturing the hardware for the flight control system-- had been
so well-conditioned that the glitch problem could not even be explained to
them. I am not amazed.)
transcribed by Tristram Brelstaff |
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