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: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