How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
Some of these have aged so perfectly that I only need substitute a few letters:<p>&gt; Python —&quot;the infantile disorder&quot;—, 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>&gt; 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>&gt; 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&#x27;t they? But it&#x27;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>&gt; 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>&gt; In the good old days physicists repeated each other&#x27;s experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to Python, so that they can share each other&#x27;s programs, bugs included.<p>Reproducibility is a real problem, and sharing code is just the first step. It&#x27;s an embarrassment to physics and mathematics that we don&#x27;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&#x27;s tendency to avoid effort.)<p>&gt; You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this.<p>Heh, yeah, let&#x27;s see what the comment section is like.