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A classic example: “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they a
by goto11 5y ago
A classic example:
“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.”
This is just typical gatekeeping, not "truth".
- musicale 5y agoDijkstra's letter "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" is a famous rant with a good deal of rhetorical flair. In context you can see that he (rather hilariously) savaged some of the most popular commercial programming languages at that time: FORTRAN, PL/I, BASIC, COBOL, and APL. (Somehow Lisp/Algol/C/Pascal got off unscathed; presumably they weren't popular enough in 1975 - otherwise Dijkstra would undoubtedly have had bad things to say about them as well.) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF
- goto11 5y agoWasn't Dijkstra involved in the design of Algol?
- the-dude 5y agoFrom your username I take : you're biased. No hope.
- tomjakubowski 5y agoProbably not GOTO 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o