68 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
68 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
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How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?
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- excerpts from a memo by Dr. E.W. Dijkstra
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- later printed in his book:
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" Selected Writings on Computing..."
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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the
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poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
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The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific computations.
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The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking
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habits, and therefore, on our thinking abilities.
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FORTRAN, "the infantile disorder", by now nearly 30 years old, is hopelessly
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inadequate for whatever computing applications you have in mind today: it is
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now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
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PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the
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solution set.
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It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
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had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
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mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
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regarded as a criminal offense.
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the
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future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new
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generation of coding bums.
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The problems of business administration in general and of database management
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in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBM JCL,
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compounded with sloppy English.
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About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a
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blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
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Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's
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native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
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Many companies that have made themselves dependent on IBM (and in so doing
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have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of
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the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.
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We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession, on the
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technical mistakes of the Dept. of Defense and, mainly, one computer
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manufacturer.
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The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems
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is a symptom of professional immaturity.
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By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft
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scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!)
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In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science
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for its support.
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In the good old days, physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to
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be sure. Today, they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's
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programs, bugs included.
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Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically
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doomed to failure.
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You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this.
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