Intellectual Control [Pragmatic Designer]

In the early days of software engineering, Edsger Dijkstra warned us not to let the size and complexity of our programs cause us to lose “intellectual control” due to the limited nature of our minds. To my knowledge, he never defined precisely what intellectual control was. Our software today is staggeringly larger than the programs of the 1960s, so does that mean we have it under our intellectual control, or did we find ways to make progress without Dijkstra’s high standards? I see signs that we have some software that is under intellectual control and other software that is not. In this column, I’m going to discuss how we can recognize these two categories, what happens when engineers on a project have different attitudes about intellectual control, some advice on when we probably should insist on it, and some ideas about how we achieve it.