E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#2I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with the man about:
"I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine."
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#3This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#4This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."
I'm sorry but it's bullshit. I taught myself programming with BASIC when I was a kid, my first programs were horrible, unstructured things with GOTOs everywhere and redundant code and yet I was able to teach myself Scheme as well a few years later.
In fact, I find that I understand the point behind useful programming language constructs (and, yes, their beauty) after spending some time suffering due to the lack of them.
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#5"... if the formal definition of a feature gets very messy and complicated, then you should not ignore that warning."
-- sounds like pg taking about Common Lisp loop.
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#6My favorite quote:
Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran.
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#7"You should realize that in any field the time lag, the delay between a significant scientific progress and its acceptance by the scientific community at large not to mention the moment that it finds its way into a product should be measured in generations."
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#8This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."
>> someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption.
Elitism and snobbery at it's finest--like saying someone whose first bike had training wheels can never learn a ten speed.
BASIC is a gateway programming drug because in many incarnations, it can DO things with a short learning curve, which is rewarding. Many intro comp sci classes start with Waxing Off as opposed to creating something and building interest which then drives the lessons. There's no deeper understanding of WHY an approach is wrong than when you've been bitten by it's ugly consequences.
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#9I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with the man about: "I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Ins…
Seems that was the original rationale behind computers, as intelligence augmentors.
Re: E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
#10This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."
I'm sorry but it's bullshit. I taught myself programming with BASIC when I was a kid, my first programs were horrible, unstructured things with GOTOs everywhere and redundant code and yet I was able to teach myself Scheme as well a few years later. In fact, I find that I understand the point behind useful programming language constructs (and, yes, their beauty) after spending some time suffering due to the lack of th…
You have a lot to prove. A giant as big as Dijkstra was, he publicly said that "corentin has mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" and you're out to prove him wrong.
Good luck. :-) Makes me feel more lucky for starting with x86 assembly although I am not sure it's any better than BASIC. God bless us!