In Alan Kay's talk "The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" () he mentions that he wrote a rebuttal to a paper of Dijkstra's called "On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic" (7:00) and said "It was basically about that, computers form a new kind of math. You can't judge them. They don't really fit well into classical math". I'm really curious what he meant by this new kind of math, but I can't find the paper anywhere. Does anyone know where it is, or where he elaborates on that specific idea?

here’s the dijsktra paper http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html

I just realized my question may have made it sound like I was looking for Dijkstra’s paper, but it was Alan’s rebuttal I couldn’t find. Nice to have a link to the Dijkstra paper anyways. The Quora answer has some great stuff. Pretty well answers my question. It’s lot to digest though.

If debugging consumes 80% of the actual elapsed time of a programmer's time in front of the computer, and a better methodology and language would cut that down significantly because it is known to be correct from the outset, then the goal of having things work the first time would be reached, and productivity would soar. This is a worthwhile goal.