``It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.''
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Anonymous2008-01-12 1:41
>``The question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as Common Lisp.''
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Anonymous2008-01-12 3:53
``The goto statement found in many high level programming language is considered harmful.''
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Anonymous2008-01-12 5:52
>APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
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Anonymous2008-01-12 5:53
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
Knuth, pg 193, volume 2:
exercise 6: [40] Look at the subroutine library of each computer installation on your organisation, and replace the random number generators with good ones. Try to avoid being too shocked at what you find.
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Anonymous2009-03-18 3:21
I'm feeling really keen, for some of that good ol' green
Dijkstra smacked hoez with the force of a thousand GOTOs
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Anonymous2010-09-22 4:44
In the long run I expect computing science to transcend its parent disciplines, mathematics and logic, by effectively realizing a significant part of Leibniz's Dream of providing symbolic calculation as an alternative to human reasoning. (Please note the difference between "mimicking" and "providing an alternative to": alternatives are allowed to be better.)
Needless to say, this vision of what computing science is about is not universally applauded. On the contrary, it has met widespread —and sometimes even violent— opposition from all sorts of directions. I mention as examples
(0) the mathematical guild, which would rather continue to believe that the Dream of Leibniz is an unrealistic illusion
(1) the business community, which, having been sold to the idea that computers would make life easier, is mentally unprepared to accept that they only solve the easier problems at the price of creating much harder ones
(2) the subculture of the compulsive programmer, whose ethics prescribe that one silly idea and a month of frantic coding should suffice to make him a life-long millionaire
(3) computer engineering, which would rather continue to act as if it is all only a matter of higher bit rates and more flops per second
(4) the military, who are now totally absorbed in the business of using computers to mutate billion-dollar budgets into the illusion of automatic safety
(5) all soft sciences for which computing now acts as some sort of interdisciplinary haven
(6) the educational business that feels that, if it has to teach formal mathematics to CS students, it may as well close its schools.