The children's bedtime story [from a former(?) Russian satellite] version of this parable is a projector film slide series titled "The coloured pencil", from the same era. It cheekily teaches the parents on how a "cost driven market based" pencil factory had a brilliant innovator, arguing, that there is no need for graphite in the end of a pencil, since nobody can use pencils when they are shorter than a cm or so. The savings made on using less graphite was stellar, the innovator got promoted.<p>Seeing the success, soon the second innovation followed: what use is the wood at the end of the pencil, when there isn't any graphite inside? Less wood, more profit.<p>And this handling of "externalised" costs continued until the pencil became dysfunctional, unusable (Dijkstra as a programmer would notice the powerful idea of recursion).<p>The story ends with the reinvention of the pencil, and a huge prime for the genius.<p>Back to Dijkstra's version: an MBA market analyst would come up with a "research" study which concludes, that in order to improve the "user experience" of the customers on the train, at least (two) WC-s would be needed in each wagon, pocketing a hefty consulting fee for the ground breaking innovation.
I get the story. I even kind of like it, but I still can't help thinking it would have been cheaper just to outfit everything with toilets and get on with life.<p>I kind of feel the same way about laptop "stand by" for energy saving (good motive, wasteful execution). My time = money and the cost of having my laptop turned on needlessly per hour is less than 2 cents while my wasted time every time it happens when I'm just about to use it/reading what it says is worth more than 2 cents. If it is about the environment I would rather them just double the price of electricity and use that towards green initiatives.
just for the record: there are <i>lots</i> of brilliant articles in dijkstra's EWDs. i am particularly fond of trip reports (almost always funny), programming language comments (e.g. EWD498, or EWD898: "<i>Stop BASIC before it stops you</i>") and insights to the commercial field of computer science (EWD 898: "I have fond memories of a project of the early 70's that postulated that we did not need programs at all! All we needed was <i>intelligence amplification</i>. If they have been able to design something that could <i>amplify</i> at all, they have probably discovered it would amplify stupidity as well; in any case I have not heard from it since.")