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primitive. But the increased power and reliability of contemporary com-
puters “made solutions feasible that programmers had not dared to
dream about a few years ago.” What computing needed to realize its
true revolutionary potential, Dijkstra argued, was a more rigorous
approach to programming—one modeled after the science of applied
mathematics.
3
Dijkstra's lament about the deplorable lack of theoretical rigor in
computing would have resonated with his audience. The ACM member-
ship, to whom Dijkstra addressed his reminiscences, was dominated by
those in the computing community who advocated a more scientifi c
approach to computing. The majority of ACM members had college
degrees (often in science, engineering, or mathematics) and the ACM as
an organization worked for decades to draw distinct boundaries between
computer science as an academic discipline and computer programming
as an occupational activity. It was an ACM journal that fi rst introduced
the discipline of computer science, and an ACM committee that devel-
oped its fi rst standardized curriculum. The Turing Award itself was an
ACM invention, intended to recognize—and stimulate—theoretical work
in the emerging discipline of computer science. By the beginning of the
early 1970s, when Dijkstra received his Turing Award, computer science
seemed well on its way to becoming just the sort of “sound body of
knowledge” whose absence Dijkstra had so regretted when fi rst he started
to program.
4
There were many reasons for Dijkstra and his fellows to aspire to
academic legitimacy. To begin with, there seemed a compelling intellec-
tual rationale for doing so. Beginning with John von Neumann's work
on numerical meteorology in the late 1940s, computational models were
increasingly being used to provide solutions—approximate solutions in
many cases, but solutions nonetheless—to scientifi c problems that had
previously been thought intractable.
5
Over the course of the 1950s, in
fi elds as diverse as economics, linguistics, physics, biology, ecology, psy-
chology, and cognitive science, techniques and concepts drawn from
computing promised dramatic new insights and capabilities.
6
As was the
case with Dijkstra, many of the most enthusiastic advocates of computer
science had come from fi elds that had been transformed by the electronic
computer. Computing was “as broad as our culture, as deep as inter-
planetary space,” declared Herbert Grosch, a former astronomer (and
future president of the ACM).
7
“Never before in the history of mankind”
had there been a phenomenon of equal importance to “the pervasion of
computers and computing into every other science fi eld and discipline,”
