How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt

Famous essay (more accurately, a collection of quotes) by EwDijkstra. Rather controversial and inflammatory; more so when it was written. The targets of Dijkstra's barbs -- popular industrial languages at the time such as FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC -- are far less widely used today, although BASIC is still widely used if you count VisualBasic.

Also contains lots of flames for IbmCorporation, which in the 70s had a reputation and market position even greater than that of MicroSoft today.

Also contains lots of useful bits of advice.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

CategoryPaper