{"id":6202,"date":"2025-06-18T08:52:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T14:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=6202"},"modified":"2025-06-18T13:06:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T19:06:37","slug":"i-saw-the-best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/i-saw-the-best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;m quoting Allen Ginsberg&#8217;s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/poets.org\/poem\/howl-parts-i-ii\">Howl<\/a><\/em>, because today is the 50th anniversary of a piece of writing by the famous computer scientist Edsger W.Dijkstra, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cs.virginia.edu\/~evans\/cs655\/readings\/ewd498.html\">How do we tell truths that might hurt?<\/a>&#8221; Dijkstra&#8217;s note is an amazingly cranky rant about computer languages. It starts off with lines like &#8220;with respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist&#8221; and gets stronger from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Five programming languages come under attack a few bullet-point paragraphs later. I think my favorite quote is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230; but they&#8217;re all quite scathing (and COBOL gets still more attention, in case you think it got off easy). Enjoy!<br><br>Oh, and I&#8217;m reminded of quotes from <a href=\"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/1610252.1610272\">this article<\/a>, on educating game developers. Favorite: &#8220;Many game companies say they will not interview or hire someone whose first programming language is Java.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m quoting Allen Ginsberg&#8217;s Howl, because today is the 50th anniversary of a piece of writing by the famous computer scientist Edsger W.Dijkstra, &#8220;How do we tell truths that might hurt?&#8221; Dijkstra&#8217;s note is an amazingly cranky rant about computer languages. It starts off with lines like &#8220;with respect to COBOL you can really do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6202"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6211,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6202\/revisions\/6211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}