CACM gave most of an issue to this, the bulk of the responses strongly disagreeing. The dissenters were not, as I recall, people generally in favor of sloppy co

CACM gave most of an issue to this, the bulk of the responses strongly disagreeing. The dissenters were not, as I recall, people generally in favor of sloppy coding. In Peter Seibel's Coders at Work, the interview of Knuth includes """ Seibel: Yet Dijkstra has a paper I'm sure you're familiar with, where he basically says we shouldn't let computer-science students touch a machine for the first few years of their training.; they should spend all their time manipulating symbols. Knuth: But that's not the way he learned either. He said a lot of really great things and inspirational things, but he's not always right. Neither am I... """ [Much more of interest, but I don't have the time to type it out now.]