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Thomas E. Kurtz has died

(computerhistory.org)
614 points 1986 | 5 comments | 14 Nov 24 22:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.7s | source
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smarks ◴[15 Nov 24 00:24 UTC] No.42142776[source]▶
Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude.

I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda think we didn't turn out half bad.

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microtherion ◴[15 Nov 24 01:00 UTC] No.42142995[source]▶
I know literally zero working programmers who learned programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught — not even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out.

Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.

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niteshpant ◴[15 Nov 24 01:52 UTC] No.42143247[source]▶
Consider me naive, but what way did Dijkstra thought it should be taught? Someone who first learned to code in QBASIC
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1. microtherion ◴[15 Nov 24 03:51 UTC] No.42143818[source]▶
Dijkstra thought of computer science as a subdomain of mathematics, and thought that hands-on experimentation with actual computers would mostly lead students astray. A program should all be worked out and proven correct before (optionally) feeding it to a computer, and testing and even more so debugging were abhorrent practices.

BASIC, on the other hand, is more aligned with what Seymour Papert later came to call "Constructionism": the student learns by experimentation.

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2. tasty_freeze ◴[15 Nov 24 05:00 UTC] No.42144088[source]▶
It is the "correct by construction" approach vs the "construct by correction" approach.
3. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[15 Nov 24 17:12 UTC] No.42148770[source]▶
That's how it was with CS at Purdue when I was there in beginning of the 1990's.

It was Computational Science, not Computer Science, and was in the math department.

We did everything wiht pen and paper until I got into my 300 level classes and we got access to the NeXT cubes and IBM 3090.

I ended up switching to networking and the tech track, but it was definitely different...

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4. systemBuilder ◴[15 Nov 24 20:00 UTC] No.42150316[source]▶
Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics.

Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms.

Computer Science is all other algorithms!

5. microtherion ◴[15 Nov 24 23:31 UTC] No.42152515[source]▶
Ironically, I grew up with limited access to computers, so I wrote many programs on paper first, including a FORTH implementation in assembly language I wrote over summer break with a typewriter, waiting for school to start again so I could actually test it hands on.