FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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.
Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating. He wrote Go To Statement Considered Harmful and On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science and left behind a bunch of pithy quotes to mine besides. You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense, why it really is quite difficult to mathematically prove that a program works, or why it makes sense to teach students software engineering and not just teach them the mathematics.
At this point I'm ready to say "Dijkstra considered harmful" or "the use of Dijkstra quotes cripples the mind, their use in discussions should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
> Having a discussion with someone who quotes Dijkstra can be frustrating.
Agreed. Most of the time, it seems the pithy quotes are the only thing that the quoter knows about Dijkstra.
> You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense
For Dijkstra's GOTO quote specifically, there's a wonderful document by David Tribble named "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" that does a line-by-line analysis of Dijkstra's paper and explains what Dijkstra's meant in the context of his time and examines where usage of GOTO still makes sense today.
Dijkstra is the Nietzsche of computer science: Eminent, quotable, often irritated, and prone to be taken exactly the wrong way by people who only half-understand his ideas.
FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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.