Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty 727
WatersOfOblivion writes "Twenty years ago today, Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer, hand wrote and distributed 'On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science' (PDF), discussing the then-current state of Computer Science education. Twenty years later, does what he said still hold true? I know it is not the case where I went to school, but have most schools corrected course and are now being necessarily cruel to their Computer Science students?" Bonus: Dijkstra's handwriting.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Ofcourse I can write a line of code!
Behold, in al its glory:
printf("hello world");
Re:When I was your age... (Score:1, Funny)
You had hands? You kids are so spoiled these days.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
cat > hello.c
printf("hello world");
^D
gcc hello.c
hello.c:1: error: expected declaration specifiers or '...' before string constant
hello.c:1: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
hello.c:1: warning: conflicting types for built-in function 'printf'
Re:The Text (Score:5, Funny)
Real-world cruelty (Score:3, Funny)
"Right from the beginning, and all through the course, we stress that the programmer's task is not just to write down a program, but that his main task is to give a formal proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification."
Where exactly do semi-formalized, poorly thought-out specifications handed to you half-written out on a napkin and constantly subject to change fit into the programmers task and Dijkstra's world?
Re:Professionals should know their tools (Score:5, Funny)
Our school had 3 separate Java classes, 3 separate C classes, and 3 separate C++ classes: all in 3 different departments.
Silly. This can't be true. Everyone knows that there are no classes in C.
I don't understand (Score:3, Funny)
I don't think I really understand what Dijkstra is getting at here. Can someone explain it to me with a car analogy?
Re:Dijkstra is the typical head-up-arse CS crack (Score:5, Funny)
You have been trolled (by Dijkstra).
Re:The Text (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think this is, wikipedia?[citation needed]
Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us (Score:5, Funny)
I love C. It's terse and really useful for optimising performance but it's really not a good teaching language.
C - all the power and flexibility of assembly language combined with the readability and maintainability of assembly language.
And I say that as someone who loves C.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Meh. Write-only Perl line noise.
How can that be a real program without about 10 lines of module and class declarations around it?
Re:The Text (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a pompous windbag (Score:3, Funny)
That pompous windbag single handedly brought computing to modern age much like American Pie brought fun part of college life into movies.
I've got Karen Allen, Kevin Bacon, and the estate of John Belushi on Lines 1 through 4, and they'd like a word with you...
Re:The Text (Score:5, Funny)
My forte is made out of cushions from my mom's couch.
Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us (Score:4, Funny)
It's certainly not pointerless!
Re:Real-world cruelty (Score:3, Funny)
Many of the professors exist in a world where faculty is king, ie in charge of every aspect of the business. Therefore not receiving inputs in the desired fashion would be unacceptable and rejected outright.
Re:The Text (Score:3, Funny)
My forte is made out of cushions from my mom's couch.
You mean your mom's couche, I think.
Re:The Text (Score:4, Funny)
Not that I come up from the basement very often, but I've never seen my mom bake bread :)
Re:The Text (Score:4, Funny)