Unit 3.1 Words of wisdom
“The only effective way to raise the confidence level of a program significantly is to give a convincing proof of its correctness. But one should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmers burden. On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand in hand.” — Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer [3]
This quote can be found at 31:03 in the following recording of Edsger W. Dijkstra's acceptance speech for the 1972 Turing Award:
The text for this presentation can be found in The University of Texas at Austin's Edsger W. Dijkstra Archive as EWD340.