[microtherion]

Dijkstra thought of computer science as a subdomain of mathematics, and thought that hands-on experimentation with actual computers would mostly lead students astray. A program should all be worked out and proven correct before (optionally) feeding it to a computer, and testing and even more so debugging were abhorrent practices.

BASIC, on the other hand, is more aligned with what Seymour Papert later came to call "Constructionism": the student learns by experimentation.

[tasty_freeze]

It is the "correct by construction" approach vs the "construct by correction" approach.

[systemBuilder]

Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics.

Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms.

Computer Science is all other algorithms!

[FuriouslyAdrift]

That's how it was with CS at Purdue when I was there in beginning of the 1990's.

It was Computational Science, not Computer Science, and was in the math department.

We did everything wiht pen and paper until I got into my 300 level classes and we got access to the NeXT cubes and IBM 3090.

I ended up switching to networking and the tech track, but it was definitely different...

[microtherion]

Ironically, I grew up with limited access to computers, so I wrote many programs on paper first, including a FORTH implementation in assembly language I wrote over summer break with a typewriter, waiting for school to start again so I could actually test it hands on.