Understanding Dijkstra's Mozart programming style

Question

I came across this article about programming styles, seen by Edsger Dijsktra. To quickly paraphrase, the main difference is Mozart, when the analogy is made to programming, ful

Answer 1

The Mozart programming style is a complete myth (everybody has to edit and modify their initial efforts), and although "Mozart" is essentially a metaphor in this example, it's worth noting that Mozart was substantially a myth himself.

Mozart was a supposed magical child prodigy who composed his first sonata at 4 (he was actually 6, and it sucked - you won't ever hear it performed anywhere). It's rarely mentioned, of course, that his father was considered Europe's greatest music teacher, and that he forced all of his children to practice playing and composition for hours each day as soon as they could pick up an instrument or a pen.

Mozart himself was careful to perpetuate the illusion that his music emerged whole from his mind by destroying most of his drafts, although enough survive to show that he was an editor like everyone else. Beethoven was just more honest about the process (maybe because he was deaf and couldn't tell if anyone was sneaking up on him anyway).

I won't even mention the theory that Mozart got his melodies from listening to songbirds. Or the fact that he created a system that used dice to randomly generate music (which is actually pretty cool, but might also explain how much of Mozart's music appeared to come from nowhere).

The moral of the story is: don't believe the hype. Programming is work, followed by more work to fix the mistakes you made the first time around, followed by more work to fix the mistakes you made the second time around, and so on and so forth until you die.