No, it's not. Dijkstra believed in programming as a formal discipline. One of his more contentious claims is that most computing scientists who wrote programs (note the "computing", not computer[1]) should use formal methods in addition to programming. In many cases this would mean proving your programs correct. In this sense you are not simply a "code monkey," you are a mathematician generating proofs of algorithmic analysis.
Now, of course, he was correct that this is quite difficult, especially if you want to do it for everything. It turns out that the demand for programs which sometimes work is higher than the demand for programs which always work, so most programmers are not mathematicians.
However, many of Dijkstra's feelings are being revisited, with a modern twist. The C security disasters of the latter part of the previous century convinced a lot of people that we have become far to lax in our discipline.
However, we still recognize that formal proofs of correctness are far too onerous for ordinary programmers. Instead, we'd like to offer the benefits of formal analysis to programmers without any experience with formal analysis. This is the study of type systems.
I could go on, but this is a long topic that I really just need to sit down and write a blog post about to cover in any sufficient detail.
[1] Computer science is not the study of computers, it's the study of computing
Now, of course, he was correct that this is quite difficult, especially if you want to do it for everything. It turns out that the demand for programs which sometimes work is higher than the demand for programs which always work, so most programmers are not mathematicians.
However, many of Dijkstra's feelings are being revisited, with a modern twist. The C security disasters of the latter part of the previous century convinced a lot of people that we have become far to lax in our discipline.
However, we still recognize that formal proofs of correctness are far too onerous for ordinary programmers. Instead, we'd like to offer the benefits of formal analysis to programmers without any experience with formal analysis. This is the study of type systems.
I could go on, but this is a long topic that I really just need to sit down and write a blog post about to cover in any sufficient detail.
[1] Computer science is not the study of computers, it's the study of computing