Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
I harbor no illusion about the effectiveness of airing this particular pet peeve; complaining about it has about the same chance of success as protesting against split infinitives or music in restaurants. Still, it is worth mentioning that the widespread use of the word “statement” to denote a programming language element, such as an assignment, that directs a computer to perform some change, is misleading. “Instruction” is the better term.
A “statement” is “something stated, such as a single declaration or remark, or a report of fact or opinions” (Merriam-Webster).
Why does it matter? The use of “statement” to mean “instruction” obscures a fundamental distinction of software engineering: the duality between specification and implementation. Programming produces a solution to a problem; success requires expressing both the problem, in the form of a specification, and the devised solution, in the form of an implementation. It is important at every stage to know exactly where we stand: on the problem side (the “what”) or the solution side (the “how”). In his famous Goto Statement Considered Harmful of 1968, Dijkstra beautifully characterized this distinction as the central issue of programming:
Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
