State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Neil Thompson]

I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit.  In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm.  When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
That never worked well

On Sun, 5 Apr 2020 at 22:37, geneb via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
> >> I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and I'm totally bummed he
> died
> >> before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
> >
> > well, close.
> > His BASIC quote is:
> > "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."
> >
>
> That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got their start in BASIC
> and grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
>
> > Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
> Hurt":
> > https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
> >
>
> The problem is that it's not a "truth", it's horseshit, plain and simple.
> People that think so much of themselves that they consider their opinions
> to have the weight of fact just make me froth at the mouth. :)
>
> > I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked.
>
> Then he should have sat down, shut up, and let the adults talk. ;)
>
> g.
>
>
> --
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>