I know who Dijkstra was, respect him greatly, and agree with most of that article, and indeed, most of everything he wrote. But this is something I disagree about. He would (here) have us speak of a computer's "store" instead of its "memory", and there were various other substitutions that he would have us do. All that that would achieve would be to develop a parallel vocabulary, one for computing machines and one for thinking beings, and an injunction to always use the right vocabulary for the right context.

What it is for a human being to try things, want things, believe things, know things, etc. is different from what it is for a program to do these things. But they also have an amount of commonality that makes insisting on separate vocabulary an unproductive ritual.

So when, for example, a compiler complains to me (must I say "issues an error message"?) that it couldn't find a file, I want it to give me the answers to questions such as "why did you look for that file?" (i.e. show me the place where you were instructed to access it), "what were you looking for?" (i.e. show me the file name exactly as you received it), "where did you look for it?" (i.e. show me the directory search path in force at the point where you looked for it), and "why did you look there?" (i.e. show me where you got that search path from). This seems to me an entirely natural and unproblematic way of speaking, and not at all in conflict with his larger message, which is of fundamental importance for programming, that programming is a mathematical activity which, when done right, carries mathematical guarantees of correctness.

That message is especially important to the task of designing superintelligent machines.

BTW, It's "Edsger".