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

Re:Mine was certainly cruel to us

[chrb]

My old university dropped C and replaced it with Java for all CS courses apart from Operating Systems. I asked one of the professors why - he said many students complained that dealing with pointers was too hard, and that the rise of Java and Java programming jobs meant C was obsolete and pointless, that the issue of programming languages came up on prospective student visit days, and that in order to be "commercially attractive" to these potential students they had to switch. We even used to do assembly language programming in the first year - now, the replacement course teaches students how to use Eclipse for Java programming.

Several years later I was back tutoring, and I was very disappointed to find out that I had to explain pointers and pointer arithmetic to people who were almost at the end of their Computer Science degree, and who didn't understand why their code was crashing with "null references" when "Java was supposed to get rid of all that memory stuff!".

Re:Hmmm...

[swordgeek]

Dijkstra's comments were right on the mark, and fairly obvious to people outside of CS. They were only contentious within the field, for some odd reason.

The thing is, Computing Science should be approached in the same manner as most other science fields: A BSc in computing should be about theory, research, and pushing the state of the art. A modicum of programming is probably necessary to accomplish that, but programming should understood in the abstract--without the emphasis on 'this command, this language.' Learning to be a programmer (a) should be a division of computer engineering, or (b) probably not a degree at all. More like a one or two year college certificate.

Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Math, and so forth, are all degrees aimed at research and study, not commercial production. Why not computing?