#ComputingScience #EdsgerDijkstra #Haskell #Education
To the members of the Budget Council (2001)

I write to you because of a rumour of efforts to replace in the introductory programming course of our undergraduate curriculum the functional language #Haskell by the imperative language #Java, and because I think that in this case the Budget Council has to take responsibility lest the decision be taken at the wrong level.

You see, it is no minor matter. Colleagues from outside the state (still!) often wonder how I can survive in a place like Austin, #Texas, automatically assuming that Texas’s solid conservatism guarantees equally solid mediocrity. My usual answer is something like “Don’t worry. The CS Department is quite an enlightened place, for instance for introductory programming we introduce our freshmen to #Haskell”; they react first almost with disbelief, and then with envy — usually it turns out that their undergraduate curriculum has not recovered from the transition from #Pascal to something like #C++ or #Java.

[…] Finally, in the specific comparison of #Haskell versus #Java, #Haskell, though not perfect, is of a quality that is several orders of magnitude higher than #Java, which is a mess (and needed an extensive advertizing campaign and aggressive salesmanship for its commercial acceptance). It is bad enough that, on the whole, industry accepts designs of well-identified lousiness as “de facto” standards. Personally I think that the University should keep the healthier alternatives alive.

It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits. This circumstance makes the choice of first programming language so important. One would like to use the introductory programming course as a means of creating a culture that can serve as a basis for computing science curriculum, rather than be forced to start that with a lot of unlearning (if that is possible at all: what has become our past, forever remains so).
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Haskell.html

#ComputingScience #EdsgerDijkstra #EWD898 #ArtificialIntelligence
The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.