3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
7:29 a.m.
On 1/2/12 9:26 PM, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2012, Ian King wrote:
I worked in a COBOL shop for a time as an analyst, and found spurious bugs
based on a lack of understanding of the idioms of COBOL. When I found a
*real* bug, one that had tortured the cost accountants for a couple of
years, it was a challenge to get them to admit it was legitimate, until
our budget finally balanced.
>> Djikstra said, "It is virtually
impossible to teach good programming
>> prctices to students with a prior exposure to BASIC; they are
mentally
>>> mutilated beyond any hope of regeneration." Quotation from "How do we tell truths that
might hurt?", Edsger
W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975, as retrieved from
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html on
2-JAN-2012:
"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."
I got it pretty close. Also, I was thinking of what he wrote in
"Unpleasant Truths : GOTO considered Haemful", so, I'll know how far off
I really was when I can find my source document.
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its
teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense." -- Ian
ONE semester, I had to teach COBOL! Somebody put that on the board before
class. They can't prove it; lots of people had chalk.
Can you find the time that he compared FORTRAN to Syphylis?
The comment I seem to remember but can't find right now claimed that Forth
requires the human programmer to serve as a preprocessor. Clever, and
painfully true, but I still really like Forth-like languages. :-)
My OS professor in my Masters program said he worked with Dijkstra for a
time, and claimed that he really was a curmudgeon. Well, that wasn't the
exact word my instructor used?. -- Ian