5 ms·

As I've probably posted before, I was at a Dijkstra lecture in the early 80s where he put up one of his famous hand-drawn slides that said "Ada: The latest gove

As I've probably posted before, I was at a Dijkstra lecture in the early 80s where he put up one of his famous hand-drawn slides that said "Ada: The latest government boondoggle that will take 5 years and 5 million dollars to kill." [5 million dollars was a lot of money back then.] So yeah, even the academics didn't much care for Ada.

paulddraper 7y ago
What did Dijkatra like? Pascal?
- Someone 7y ago
  ALGOL 60. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Compiler_construction_and_programming_language_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Compiler_co...: ”Dijkstra was known to be a fan of ALGOL 60, and worked on the team that implemented the first compiler for that language. He was closely involved in the ALGOL 60 development, realisation and popularisation.” Also: Haskell and pascal over C++ and Java (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Haskell.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...)
  - microtherion 7y ago
    …for CS instruction. I've never come across any indication that Dijkstra wrote actual code (in the sense of something executing on a computer) after 1970 or so. The algorithms in the EWD notes are all written in ALGOL style pseudocode. Dijkstra was the CS equivalent of the Patent Law concept of a "Non-Practicing Entity", which gave him great liberty to troll all programming languages without exposing his own choices or designs to corresponding scrutiny.
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      This nails it. Dijkstra sort of hated computers; he always hand-drew overhead projector transparencies for his lectures. He's also famous for saying we should call our field "Computing Science" because "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
      - msla 7y ago
        > "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's more accurate to say that CS is no more about computers than aerodynamics is about flying: Without flight, aerodynamics would barely exist as a distinct field, and wouldn't be of interest to anyone except people in a sub-field of fluid dynamics, and never intersecting with practical concerns such as materials science and the overall design of buildable objects. Similarly with CS: Without computers it would be a simple, obscure sub-field of mathematics, about where it was in the 1930s when Post and Turing and Gödel were active, and it wouldn't intersect with fields like electronics or, probably, have much to do with formal grammars.
    - ajxs 7y ago
      If I could upvote this twice, I would.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Before C was even a thing, plenty of computer systems got developed in Algol dialects for systems programming, like ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, Algol RS,...
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  He was teaching at UT Austin and Pascal was the CS department's pedagogical language of choice back then, so I presume the answer was yes. Or at least I never heard him say he hated it.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    My impression of Ada via undergraduate exposure at Embry-Riddle was that it was like an industrial strength Pascal. I never thought later on that I needed Ada, but then I didn't go on to work with avionics or anything like that. And I always thought that Pascal+extensions was a pretty good way to develop applications and was disappointed when the Macintosh moved towards C and C++. I learned to write GUI applications with THINK Pascal, before Java existed. In the version of Ada we had, it was DOS based, but I found out that you could use the interrupt API, allowing VGA graphics.
aswanson 7y ago
I worked with a guy who worked on a ge defense contract in the late 80s that demanded ada as the design language. He worked there 2 years learning the language without writing any code before they laid the team off.
Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
Ah, those famous people and their catchy phrases. They do a lot of damage sometimes.

paulddraper 7y ago

What did Dijkatra like? Pascal?

Someone 7y ago
ALGOL 60. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Compiler_construction_and_programming_language_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Compiler_co...: ”Dijkstra was known to be a fan of ALGOL 60, and worked on the team that implemented the first compiler for that language. He was closely involved in the ALGOL 60 development, realisation and popularisation.” Also: Haskell and pascal over C++ and Java (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Haskell.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...)
- microtherion 7y ago
  …for CS instruction. I've never come across any indication that Dijkstra wrote actual code (in the sense of something executing on a computer) after 1970 or so. The algorithms in the EWD notes are all written in ALGOL style pseudocode. Dijkstra was the CS equivalent of the Patent Law concept of a "Non-Practicing Entity", which gave him great liberty to troll all programming languages without exposing his own choices or designs to corresponding scrutiny.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    This nails it. Dijkstra sort of hated computers; he always hand-drew overhead projector transparencies for his lectures. He's also famous for saying we should call our field "Computing Science" because "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
    - msla 7y ago
      > "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's more accurate to say that CS is no more about computers than aerodynamics is about flying: Without flight, aerodynamics would barely exist as a distinct field, and wouldn't be of interest to anyone except people in a sub-field of fluid dynamics, and never intersecting with practical concerns such as materials science and the overall design of buildable objects. Similarly with CS: Without computers it would be a simple, obscure sub-field of mathematics, about where it was in the 1930s when Post and Turing and Gödel were active, and it wouldn't intersect with fields like electronics or, probably, have much to do with formal grammars.
  - ajxs 7y ago
    If I could upvote this twice, I would.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Before C was even a thing, plenty of computer systems got developed in Algol dialects for systems programming, like ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, Algol RS,...
dreamcompiler 7y ago
He was teaching at UT Austin and Pascal was the CS department's pedagogical language of choice back then, so I presume the answer was yes. Or at least I never heard him say he hated it.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  My impression of Ada via undergraduate exposure at Embry-Riddle was that it was like an industrial strength Pascal. I never thought later on that I needed Ada, but then I didn't go on to work with avionics or anything like that. And I always thought that Pascal+extensions was a pretty good way to develop applications and was disappointed when the Macintosh moved towards C and C++. I learned to write GUI applications with THINK Pascal, before Java existed. In the version of Ada we had, it was DOS based, but I found out that you could use the interrupt API, allowing VGA graphics.

aswanson 7y ago

I worked with a guy who worked on a ge defense contract in the late 80s that demanded ada as the design language. He worked there 2 years learning the language without writing any code before they laid the team off.

Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago

Ah, those famous people and their catchy phrases. They do a lot of damage sometimes.