Talk:On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science

message: As requested and as an actual participant in the 1990 debate On the Cruelty (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.86.html#subj1) I have expanded this stub. --Edward G. Nilges
:In case no one has thanked you, let me: it was an interesting read. Have you considered editing more articles? Wikipedia could use people like you. --maru 00:22, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I appreciated the material; however, it felt very editorial in tone and more like a "review" of Dijkstra's remarks than encyclopedic content.  Does anyone want to undertake a rewrite of the current content? --Calebbell 19:39, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Authorship 

message: I did a major rewrite to remove editorializing and make the flow sound more encyclopedia, rather than an essay written by a friend or colleague.
I moved some biographical text to Talk:Edsger Dijkstra, since it seemed more appropriate for that article, if it's going to be anywhere.
I was unable to resolve one issue.  Consider the following quotes:
:many students were beginning to ask in good faith why they (to use a common complaint) had to learn how to write a compiler when so many compilers had been written.
:They asked, in good faith...why it was necessary to be so apparently arrogant as to appoint oneself to re-analyze the problem, “all the way down.”
:Unfortunately, this fails to prepare many for the “cruelty” of writing, for example, a C compiler in C, and, the very act seems unnatural, and carrying coal to Newcastle in the problem formulation alone.
You certainly don't need to know the details of how a program is actually compiled and run in order to be able to model it mathematically and make formal statements about it.  I'm not sure the debate over how much detail students should be taught is related to the debate over formal correctness.  Was the compiler example or anything like it something Dijkstra used in his paper?  If not, it might not be relevant to the topic.
At MIT, at least, computer science majors are taught everything from how the EM fields inside transitors give rise to their electrical properties, to how they are assembled into logic gates and chips, to how the kernel and compiler work, to high-level artificial intelligence techniques.  The introductory CS class includes the construction of a Lisp interpreter in Lisp, which is indeed rather mind-warping and somewhat pointless except for its educational side-effects. (But why else would you be in college if not to learn?  Wait...don't answer that.)  I can't really evaluate the scope of the curriculum at other schools, though, and that only needs to be in the article if this is relevant to assessing the legacy of this paper. 
-- Beland 01:42, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major cleanup 

message: I removed "Not true about the University of Warsaw" because it wasn't referenced or explained. Also, I'm not certain that listing schools that follow Dijkstra is a good idea. If there are schools that follow Dijkstra, we can weaken the wording ("most schools don't...") and reference some curriculum/course explanation pages that use Dijkstra's methods.  --JamesBrownJr (talk) 22:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pedagogical legacy - Counterexamples 

message: From the article:
"Until the end of his life, Dijkstra maintained that the central challenges of computing hadn’t been met to his satisfaction, due to an insufficient emphasis on program correctness (though not obviating other requirements, such as maintainability and efficiency)."
The phrase "until the end of his life" is problematic:  one might reasonably infer that Dijkstra changed his opinion at the end of his life, shortly before death.   
I think this is probably not the intended case -- it's more likely, in my mind, that Dijkstra did not change his opinion -- in which case, the phrase should read "throughout his adult life," or words to that effect.
If you know the facts of the matter, please update the article as appropriate.
Karl gregory jones (talk) 17:57, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguous phrase needs disambiguation