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           University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science
                  CS655: Programming Languages, Spring 2001

                   How do we tell truths that might hurt?

                       Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975
         from https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF

     Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are
     in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we
     must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If
     the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically
     incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally
     unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary,
     foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such
     truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles,
     and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal
     risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)

     Computing Science seems to suffer severely from this conflict. On
     the whole, it remains silent and tries to escape this conflict by
     shifting its attention. (For instance: with respect to COBOL you can
     really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that
     it does not exist. Most Computer Science Departments have opted for
     the latter easy way out.) But, Brethern, I ask you: is this honest?
     Is not our prolonged silence fretting away Computing Science's
     intellectual integrity? Are we decent by remaining silent? If not,
     how do we speak up?

     To give you some idea of the scope of the problem I have listed a
     number of such truths. (Nearly all computing scientists I know well
     will agree without hesitation to nearly all of them. Yet we allow
     the world to behave as if we did not know them....)

     * Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied
       mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure
       mathematicians.
     * The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific
       computations.
     * The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our
       thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
     * FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old,
       is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have
       in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive
       to use.
     * PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than
       to the solution set.
     * 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.
     * The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore,
       be regarded as a criminal offence.
     * APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language
       of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it
       creates a new generation of coding bums.
     * The problems of business administration in general and data base
       management in particular are much too difficult for people that
       think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English.
     * About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil
       with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt
       axes instead.
     * Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery
       of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent
       programmer.
     * Many companies that have made themselves dependent on IBM-equipment
       (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse
       under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data
       processing systems.
     * Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. [Handwritten
       annotation]
     * We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession on
       the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly,
       one computer manufacturer.
     * The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing
       systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
     * By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the
       soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less
       dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering
       requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.
     * In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments,
       just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can
       share each other's programs, bugs included.
     * Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are
       intrinsically doomed to fail.

     Isn't this list enough to make us uncomfortable? What are we going
     to do? Return to the order of the day, presumably.......

18th June 1975                          prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra
Plataanstraat 5                         Burroughs Research Fellow
NUENEN - 4565
The Netherlands

     PS. If the conjecture "You would rather that I had not disturbed you
     by sending you this." is correct, you may add it to the list of
     uncomfortable truths.
       _______________________________________________________________

   CS 655 University of Virginia
   CS 655: Programming Languages
   cs655-staff@cs.virginia.edu
   Last modified: Mon Feb 26 15:05:50 2001