In my opinion, The Proper Way To Teach Computer Science was the one area where Dijkstra made his most detrimental contribution, by promoting a particular school of instruction based on strong opinions with weak to no empirical underpinnings.

In _Coders at Work_, Knuth offers a counter-argument that I find compelling:

> Seibel: It seems a lot of the people I've talked to had direct access to a machine when they were starting out. Yet Dijkstra has a paper I'm sure you're familiar with, where he basically says we shouldn't let computer-science science students touch a machine for the first few years of their training; they should spend all their time manipulating symbols.

> Knuth: But that's not the way he learned either. He said a lot of really great things and inspirational things, but he's not always right. Neither am I, but my take on it is this: Take a scientist in any field. The scientist gets older and says, "Oh, yes, some of the things that I've been doing have a really great payoff and other things, I'm not using anymore. I'm not going to have my students waste time on the stuff that doesn't make giant steps. I'm not going to talk about low-level stuff at all. These theoretical concepts are really so powerful-that's the whole story. Forget about how I got to this point." I think that's a fundamental error made by scientists in every field. They don't realize that when you're learning something you've got to see something at all levels. You've got to see the floor before you build the ceiling. That all goes into the brain and gets shoved down to the point where the older people forget that they needed it.

> Peter Seibel. _Coders at Work_

It is clear from the reading the EWDs that Dijkstra considered actually doing something with Computers detrimental to the practice of Computer Science as he conceived it, but the kind of Computer Science he practiced past 1975 or so was not particularly useful to Computer Engineering, because it refused to engage with it, and, as the article points out, it was not even particularly good math, because it refused to engage properly with that field as well.

Knuth also starts his book by defining his own assembly language and computer architecture.

Because at the time he wrote it there wasn't a good standard or sufficiently common one that had the properties he wanted to use for exploring algorithms. See MMIX for something closer to a modern architecture than the original MIX.

I meant that he clearly had hardware in mind when writing his algorithms.

I love that quote. Reminds me of a similar one by Taken, I think. Basically that many seem to think they can get the end product without growing it.

And there are a lot of people that dismiss his comment and the rest of his writings by ignoring what BASIC meant at the time of writing. Visual BASIC certainly wouldn't have been his favorite language, but had the features that BASIC at the time lacked and that he disliked it for (when you start digging into it: lack of recursion, non-reentrant functions, massive use of global variables, preference for goto versus structured control flow).

Remember Dijkstra also ridiculed Margaret Hamiltons ideas of software development.

Nevertheless Hamiltons software put a man on the the moon.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...

My first language was actually GWBASIC on an ancient hand-me-down computer, followed by QBASIC. When I saw that quote as a teenager I was terrified that I had killed my career before it had even started.

I've since become quite proficient in C, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, HTML, JS, shell scripting, and many many other languages and environments. So IMO there is very little modern merit to the idea that exposure to BASIC (or any other mocked language) is "mentally mutilat[ing]".

BASIC only ruins you if you have no intellectual curiosity. BASIC was my first language and with each new language I’ve learned since I’ve always been excited at the new possibilities and paradigms it opened up.

BASIC got a whole generation of people interested in programming.

I've yet to meet somebody who got interested in computers through correctness proofs.

At university my formal methods lecturer once said, presumably in jest, "no software developer should be allowed to use an actual computer until they are 40 years old."

I wear it as a badge of honor, since I first learned programming in BASIC -- the good old line numbered variety -- on a mainframe. Then again I've never claimed that I'm not mentally mutilated.