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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.

2 of 727 comments (clear)

  1. The Text by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. Re:Hmmm... by mhesd · · Score: 5, Informative

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