Personally, I've always thought this letter was the plainest proof that Dijkstra's pithy quotes (and those that parrot them) should not be taken seriously, no matter how entertaining they are. That list covers most the major languages of the day; what he would have to say about $(YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE) would surely be equally unkind were he alive today.<p>That isn't to say that he did not have valid reasoning for his dislikes as a language expert and a mathematician but those reasons are not ones the bulk of practitioners would likely agree are valid.
Some of these have aged so perfectly that I only need substitute a few letters:<p>> Python —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 30 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.<p>> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to JS: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.<p>> The use of Java cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.<p>The quotes about languages were always controversial, weren't they? But it's clear now in retrospect what Dijkstra was complaining about. He found FORTRAN to trick people into thinking that programming was merely about specifying arithmetic operations in a certain order, considered BASIC to require mental models which rendered folks memetically blind to actual machine behaviors, and thought COBOL tried to be legible to management but ended up being confusing to everybody.<p>> Many companies that have made themselves dependent on AWS-equipment (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.<p>Yep.<p>> In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to Python, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.<p>Reproducibility is a real problem, and sharing code is just the first step. It's an embarrassment to physics and mathematics that we don't have a single holistic repository of algorithms, but have to rebuild everything from scratch every time. (Perlis would tell Dijkstra that this is an inevitable facet of computing, and Dijkstra would reply that Perlis is too accepting of humanity's tendency to avoid effort.)<p>> You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this.<p>Heh, yeah, let's see what the comment section is like.
He wrote this in 1975, dissing most of the popular programming languages of the time. Does anyone know which language Dijkstra <i>didn't</i> think was a mess? (and please don't say GCL, his own unrunnable toy language)<p>I mean, if FORTRAN is a mess, then isn't ALGOL too? Is anyone here old enough to remember?
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