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Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty

Posted by timothy on from the pleasant-legacy dept.

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.

14 of 727 comments (clear)

  1. Mine was certainly cruel to us by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Funny

    They made us do mostly Java, even though a number of us could do C or C++.

    1. Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us by ciderVisor · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      Squirrel!
    2. Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us by Bloke+down+the+pub · · Score: 3, Funny

      C obsolete and pointless?

      It's certainly not pointerless!

      --
      It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
  2. Re:Hmmm... by ZeroExistenZ · · Score: 4, Funny

    i.e. CS programs producing students who know loads and loads of theory and can't write a damn line of actual code.

    Ofcourse I can write a line of code!
    Behold, in al its glory:

    printf("hello world");

    --
    I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
  3. Re:Hmmm... by 16384 · · 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'

  4. Re:The Text by wilder_card · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do you think this is, wikipedia?

  5. Re:Professionals should know their tools by jazzduck · · 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.

    --
    A cat is no trade for integrity!
  6. Re:Dijkstra is the typical head-up-arse CS crack by russotto · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    In my experience this is utter arrogant rubbish.

    You have been trolled (by Dijkstra).

  7. Re:The Text by nschubach · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do you think this is, wikipedia?[citation needed]

    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  8. Re:The Text by msuarezalvarez · · Score: 4, Funny

    But what a troll! Look around and see the pityful kind of trolls we are mostly left with now :(

  9. Re:The Text by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Funny

    My forte is made out of cushions from my mom's couch.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  10. Re:The Text by theturtlemoves · · Score: 3, Funny

    My forte is made out of cushions from my mom's couch.

    You mean your mom's couche, I think.

    --
    Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves.
  11. Re:The Text by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Funny

    Not that I come up from the basement very often, but I've never seen my mom bake bread :)

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  12. Re:The Text by Potor · · Score: 3, Funny

    What about Beowulf? I mean, that's over a millennium ago, and he certainly left his mark on computer scientists.