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IIRC the point that Dijkstra made was that the available programming languages, like Fortran or Cobol were already FUBAR. He considered them toxic. So he would
by choeger 5y ago
IIRC the point that Dijkstra made was that the available programming languages, like Fortran or Cobol were already FUBAR. He considered them toxic.
So he would have thought differently in a world with more mature tools like Haskell, Rust, or a decent Lisp implementation.
- random314 5y agoDijkstra actually recommended Haskell as a teaching language.
- wyager 5y agoHe was not happy when the UT administrators decided to switch to Java under pressure from donors.
- random314 5y agoDonors? I did not know that donors forced the switch!
- pvarangot 5y agoI did my algo1 class with Haskell (Hugs 98) and honestly it was great. It also "evens the playing field" a lot among people with previous coding experience vs. people getting their toes wet for the first time. A lot of that was having a very powerful REPL. The problem is when you want to get into basic data structures. The learning curve for Haskell, if you want students to come up with their own implementations, steepens up a lot.