Talk:On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science

Authorship

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)

Women

What's with all the irrelevant references to women? Was this an actual part of the original debate, or is it just editorialising on the part of the writer? --221.249.13.34 04:54, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Women...can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em, huh?

The references are not irrevelant because the objections to Dijkstra's call for a "cruel" emphasis on symbolic manipulation as aired in CACM in 1990 drew fire primarily from women entrants to computer science: please check comp.risks posts and other sources from 1990 on this matter. It drew little objection from other quarters.

I was interviewed for a planned film on women and computing based on my contribution to the debate, which was that women were being done no favor by any de-emphasis on symbolic manipulation.

The issue centered on women and computing and was one in which Dijkstra (whose subsequently aired views on globalization were quite progressive) was re-presented as reactionary because of the paradoxes of identity politics.

Women's experience in computing was foregrounded in the debate. But because Dijkstra lost the debate, CS programs aren't honest about the intellectual demands of CS, which are discovered in a retail fashion, one at a time, by CS majors (how do you debug a C program? change your major).

CS is now taught like calculus in which foundational problems which affect the teaching are brushed aside in macho pragmatic fashion, and the emphasis is on the use of fashionable and Politically Correct platforms like Linux.

To be part of the action and to have a lively and readable style isn't necessarily "editorializing" although of course it might be. NPOV has more to do with purity of heart in Kant's sense than LCD. Which is of course a meta-POV.

Signed, --210.21.221.178 02:14, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) (four tildes, how about that: how gnomic) Edward G. Nilges

Fair 'nuff. Thanks for the response. --221.249.13.34 02:10, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Compuer Science v. Mathematics & Ivory Towers

Computer programs are written primarily for real-world purposes. Mathematical proof of freedom from bugs is far down on the list of priorities, and rightly so.

Microsoft does not need formal proof to market and sell a product. Producing a formal proof would be a massive effort, costing more money that could be recovered from the value-added the proof might produce.

Even if they wanted to, no sufficiently-rigorous definitions are ever produced for large programs to drive such a formal proof.

Formal proof of correctness is the essence of Ivory Tower.

Only someone who has never worked overtime against a ship date, and never dealt with fuzzy requirements, and never fended off a customer so eager for a product they would take a version known to be buggy, would fail to see, or de-emphasize, the real-world counterpoints to thus exalting formal proof.