alt Hacker NewsIDK what Dijkstra believed in terms of how programmers should have looked like, bu the did seem to have a sense (and taste) of a direction of programming that was lost within practicing software engineering and their prefered PLs.
My own incomplete opionion is that the net effect is that we ended up writing orderd of magnitude more code than necessary to solve the problems at hand. It's the equivalent of doing the computations manually instead of using a calculator. This has led to an industry that has served us well, but strictly speaking it was never necessary and much more could have been achieved with a fraction of the resources.
While there is certainly some amount of unnecessary junk code out there, your claim that it could be reduced by an order of magnitude isn't even close to correct. In general the only way to write less code is to use higher level abstractions. The problem, of course, is that those abstractions are always leaky and using them tends to make certain required features too slow or even impossible to build at all. There is no free lunch.