For those of us less familiar with his work, do you have an example of some of his less tame, more arrogant writing?
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.
The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with
computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or
the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at
least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated
as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond
recovery.
But I must leave you with a quote from Sir Alan Kay that I found on the Wikiquote page while I was researching this:
You probably know that arrogance, in computer science, is measured in nanodijkstras.
I think finding fault with this kind of opinion is a symptom of the modern concept of "taking offence". Ie nobody can express an opinion without also showing that they respect others' opinions. But that's not right. We don't have to respect each others' opinions if we think they are wrong. What we must do in a free society is respect their right to have, and express, a different opinion.
Dijkstra clearly thinks that teaching BASIC is damaging people's brains so he says that loudly and clearly with a touch of humour. Should he water it down to avoid offending people that like BASIC?
Firstly, he doesn't say that understanding COBOL and BASIC is a crime: he says that teaching COBOL and BASIC should be regarded as a crime. And he lays out why: he says that exposure to those languages causes some kind of mental damage, so he is likening the teaching of them to the intentional infliction of an injury. Clearly this is tongue-in-cheek - it is highly unreasonable to infer that he literally wanted the teaching of two programming languages added to the criminal code, because this is absurd on its face.
The intended takeaway is that there are habits of thought learned by use of BASIC or COBOL that are must be unlearned to think about programming problems in that way that Dijkstra recommends.
He puts this statement in a list of very serious statements, most of which are actually true, claiming:
Nearly all computing scientists I know well will
agree without hesitation to nearly all of them.
What it is about is how arrogant and absurd it is to say that learning BASIC causes brain damage. If people couldn't re-learn and develop new ideas, we wouldn't even have computers.
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...