The Humble Programmer, 53 Years Later

In the main segment, we unpack “The Humble Programmer” (1972) and why it still reads like a briefing for 2025. Dijkstra’s claim that “programming will remain very difficult” lands squarely in the age of AI code generation: as tools remove circumstantial cumbersomeness, our ambitions expand and the problems get harder. We connect his call to “prepare ourselves for the shock” with today’s anxieties about what changes (tooling, surface syntax) versus what persists (the intellectual work of modeling complex systems, making tradeoffs, and ensuring software actually works). We also look at the economic and perception cycles Dijkstra flagged—how developers oscillate between being overpraised and undervalued—and argue for humility plus discipline over curmudgeonly fatalism. The takeaway: better tools don’t trivialize programming; they raise the ceiling on what we attempt. Then in the news roundup: (1) Chrome will warn by default on first‑time HTTP navigations, effectively finishing the move to HTTPS‑everywhere; (2) Apache Fory Rust promises zero‑copy, cross‑language, high‑throughput serialization; and (3) Samsung makes idle‑screen ads official on high‑end smart fridges. Links Main segment Original blog post: 53 Years Later, The Humble Programmer Still Explains Our Existential Panic E. W. Dijkstra — The Humble Programmer (EWD340), PDF E. W. Dijkstra — The Humble Programmer (EWD340), HTML transcription Edsger W. Dijkstra — Wikipedia “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” — DOI Dijkstra's algorithm — Wikipedia Structured programming — Wikipedia ALGOL — Wikipedia Fortran — Wikipedia Lisp (programming language) — Wikipedia News Chrome to warn on unencrypted HTTP by default Introducing Apache Fory Rust: A Versatile Serialization Framework for the Modern Age Samsung makes ads on $3,499 smart fridges official