I’m quoting Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, because today is the 50th anniversary of a piece of writing by the famous computer scientist Edsger W.Dijkstra, “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” Dijkstra’s note is an amazingly cranky rant about computer languages. It starts off with lines like “with respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist” and gets stronger from there.

Five programming languages come under attack a few bullet-point paragraphs later. I think my favorite 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.

… but they’re all quite scathing (and COBOL gets still more attention, in case you think it got off easy). Enjoy!

Oh, and I’m reminded of quotes from this article, on educating game developers. Favorite: “Many game companies say they will not interview or hire someone whose first programming language is Java.”