Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

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His paper "How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?" Is a good example, IMHO:

  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.

More:

  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.

Given, I'm cherry-picking here. Not everything Edsger says is like this. Not by a long shot. He is brilliant, make no mistake.

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.

Given, it's Alan, so I don't know how serious he was being.

And you don't find that extremely funny?

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?

When he has no argument other than the insult no, it really isn't funny. Why is understanding Cobol and BASIC a crime? No idea, only that the great and powerful EWD says so.

How could you possibly take that away from the quoted material?

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.

But what he implies is his belief is that learning those languages actually damages your ability to think. I'd agree that he was kidding, but I read the rest of the article (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW...).

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.

That sure as heck doesn't sound toungue-in-cheek.

Dijkstra has every write to voice his opionion however he pleases. And this isn't offending people who like BASIC. BASIC is a stupid language.

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.

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