Second Languages Slow Brain Decline

[Xipe Totec]

27. How do we tell truths that might hurt? - Essay by Edsger W.Dijkstra

Frankly, Dijkstra doesn't have any kind things to say about any computer language, but he particularly despised COBOL:

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

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.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.


http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html

I took my first computer language course in 1973 - FORTRAN. COBOL was the second language. Dijkstra's essay was published in 1975. In 40 plus years as a programmer, I can't say that I ever used COBOL professionally. Mostly because there were always so many COBOL programmers to choose from and far, far fewer FORTRAN programmers. Then came C, and C++, and later JAVA - The COBOL of the internets.