Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty

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.

Comments

Mine was certainly cruel to us

[MikeRT]

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

Re:Hmmm...

[16384]

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

[wilder_card]

What do you think this is, wikipedia?

Re:Professionals should know their tools

[jazzduck]

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.

Re:Dijkstra is the typical head-up-arse CS crack

[russotto]

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).

Re:The Text

[nschubach]

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