Dijkstra's Diss Track

This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field.

Instead of using social media, Dijkstra would dash off hot takes on his typewriter or his pen and in this episode we cover various of his opinions and essays. You'll hear him say stuff like, "Java sucks" and it's "cowardly to call our errors 'bugs'."

Here are some links to the material we discussed:

• On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)
• Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)
• “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (1975)
• “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming” 
• (Video) “Lecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programing” - 1990 

Send us Fan Mail