Tuesday, April 22, 2008

I am glad E.W.Dijkstra was wrong


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.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

I'm sorry, mr. Dijkstra, but it seems that the Pascal language that you liked so much (a boring article that proves that E. Dijkstra loved Pascal) didn't flee far away from BASIC. At least BASIC gave an ability to loop with custom step (not 1 or -1), didn't have ugly 'begin' and 'end' block marks, didn't have meaningless keywords like 'program' and all the other useless and ugly shit. I'm really sorry for coders that had to write 'procedure' before every void func declaration.

It makes also quite clear why the new programming language cannot be expected to be an improvement over PASCAL, on which the new language should be "based". (I am pretty sure that the new language --if it ever gets designed at all-- will be much, much worse than PASCAL if they proceed in this fashion.)
I'm really sorry for those who had to write something like fucktorial := fucktorial*n; exit function instead of using a simple return operator. The most stupid thing in this language was the fact that the use of semicolon ; operator before the end keyword was optional — actually, using it could get you into a trouble in if ... else constructions — and the . symbol after the final end keyword.

Pascal is an indication of a bad taste. It's an indication of a mind of a slave that tends to listen to what the 50-year-old teacher said you should stick to, instead of seeing much better tools around. (It applies to the time 10 years ago, I doubt anyone at all uses Pascal nowadays).

Pascal sucks. Even Brainfuck is more suited for everyday coding then Pascal.

I uncomfortably shiver when I remember ugly blocks of forward declarations. And I'm really glad that honorable E.W.Dijkstra was wrong.


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