4 ms·

You're not the first to notice a pattern, and you're in good company: > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prio

You're not the first to notice a pattern, and you're in good company: > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. --Edsger W. Dijkstra Though, to be fair, he would likely say that about a lot of mainstream languages today. Iirc he was very fond of Miranda, which in many ways was a precursor to Haskell.

eesmith 8y ago
To be fair, he said that about a lot of mainstream languages back then. That quote is from EWD498 at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW... . The larger context is (the rest of the comment quotes him): FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
- klodolph 8y ago
  Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating. He wrote Go To Statement Considered Harmful and On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science and left behind a bunch of pithy quotes to mine besides. You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense, why it really is quite difficult to mathematically prove that a program works, or why it makes sense to teach students software engineering and not just teach them the mathematics. At this point I'm ready to say "Dijkstra considered harmful" or "the use of Dijkstra quotes cripples the mind, their use in discussions should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
  - macintux 8y ago
    Ask them whether they'd use Yogi Berra quotes to decide how best to manage a baseball team.
  - GrumpyYoungMan 8y ago
    > Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating. Agreed. Most of the time, it seems the pithy quotes are the only thing that the quoter knows about Dijkstra. > You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense For Dijkstra's GOTO quote specifically, there's a wonderful document by David Tribble named "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" that does a line-by-line analysis of Dijkstra's paper and explains what Dijkstra's meant in the context of his time and examines where usage of GOTO still makes sense today. http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html
  - msla 8y ago
    Dijkstra is the Nietzsche of computer science: Eminent, quotable, often irritated, and prone to be taken exactly the wrong way by people who only half-understand his ideas.
  - qubex 8y ago
    The dicta of Dijisktra should be handled with the same accommodation of self-contradictory paradox as is accorded to zen koans.
  - hindsightbias 8y ago
    Dijkstra is the Godwin of Computer Science

eesmith 8y ago

To be fair, he said that about a lot of mainstream languages back then. That quote is from EWD498 at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW... . The larger context is (the rest of the comment quotes him): FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

klodolph 8y ago
Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating. He wrote Go To Statement Considered Harmful and On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science and left behind a bunch of pithy quotes to mine besides. You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense, why it really is quite difficult to mathematically prove that a program works, or why it makes sense to teach students software engineering and not just teach them the mathematics. At this point I'm ready to say "Dijkstra considered harmful" or "the use of Dijkstra quotes cripples the mind, their use in discussions should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
- macintux 8y ago
  Ask them whether they'd use Yogi Berra quotes to decide how best to manage a baseball team.
- GrumpyYoungMan 8y ago
  > Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating. Agreed. Most of the time, it seems the pithy quotes are the only thing that the quoter knows about Dijkstra. > You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense For Dijkstra's GOTO quote specifically, there's a wonderful document by David Tribble named "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" that does a line-by-line analysis of Dijkstra's paper and explains what Dijkstra's meant in the context of his time and examines where usage of GOTO still makes sense today. http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html
- msla 8y ago
  Dijkstra is the Nietzsche of computer science: Eminent, quotable, often irritated, and prone to be taken exactly the wrong way by people who only half-understand his ideas.
- qubex 8y ago
  The dicta of Dijisktra should be handled with the same accommodation of self-contradictory paradox as is accorded to zen koans.
- hindsightbias 8y ago
  Dijkstra is the Godwin of Computer Science