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

The Text

[eldavojohn]

For those of you looking for some old fashioned HyperText Markup Language, here is a transcription of the 892 KB PDF to HTML by Javier Smaldone.

While the handwriting is a novelty (and the PDF is actually small for a PDF), I question how long that server is going to last.

Also (and yes this is nitpicking), I must contest this:

Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer

I submit for consideration Alan Turing who may have designed the ACE and worked on the earliest computer (The Manchester Mark I) although never really owned it or any other computer. I think a lot of people identify him as not only a hero of World War II but also the father of all computers.

Re:The Text

[Packet Pusher]

The Dijkstra wiki link said he owned a Mac for email and web browsing. How can they expect us to read the links if they aren't going to themselves.

Re:The Text

[WhiplashII]

what problems are you talking about?

Achieving higher than normal reliability.

I have... No clue - It's used in vital logic for failover between redundant controllers.

OK, perhaps I should have mentioned "in the context of avionics systems." A watchdog timer is a timer that resets a CPU system if a timeout is reached. It is a way of attempting to achieve reliability in the presence of less reliable hardware.

No clue

Obviously ;)

Do you believe that flying above the atmosphere changes your variables?

Do you believe it doesn't? The atmosphere stops gamma rays from hitting your equipment. These gamma rays change the value of variables (as in, the gamma ray flips the DFF circuit to the opposite value in your CPU). That means you cannot rely on variables to make sure your loop exits. Therefor loops are bad.

I think you are just spouting random gibberish.

I have a multimillion dollar budget that says I am not - how about you?

Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us

[DiegoBravo]

You're right. Also Stroustrup had clearly pointed (in other argument lines) that C is not the better way to learn C++ (or OO in general):

BEGIN EXCERPT from http://www.research.att.com/~bs/new_learning.pdf :

        One conventional answer to the question ''Which subset of C++ should I learn first?'' is ''The C subset
of C++.'' In my considered opinion, that's not a good answer. The C-first approach leads to an early focus
on low-level details. It also obscures programming style and design issues by forces the student to face
many technical difficulties to express anything interesting.

Re:Hmmm...

[mhesd]

cat > hello.pl
printf("hello world\n");
^D
perl hello.pl
hello world

Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us

[TheRaven64]

And, sadly, only the second part of that is true anymore. A few examples of things that are in a modern assembly language and not in standard C:

• Vector operations.
• Atomic operations.
• Condition codes for overflow checking on arithmetic.