[mlajtos]

Dijkstra's go-to language (pun intended) was Algol 60 (& Pascal) – everything else was shit in his view. Some of his comments:

FORTRAN — "an infantile disorder"

COBOL — "the use of COBOL cripples the mind"

BASIC — students exposed to it are "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"

PL/I — "the fatal disease"

APL — "a mistake, carried through to perfection"

He liked his languages and programs to be easily traceable with pen & paper. He always wrote programs on the paper (and proved correctness) and only then into computer. REPL-driven development (what APL pioneered) was a foreign concept to him. He would be so appalled by LLM code generation.

[ilayn]

Read the sources carefully. Fortran quote is not his; he quoted it. Also remember that he was talking about pre-Fortran77 era. F77 tried to fix some of the criticisms though did not succeed fully. Here is a nice dig-in about the quote https://limited.systems/articles/dijkstra-fortran/

Another note to remember that John Backus, the team lead of the Fortran gang, was in the Algol committee. So these folks knew what they are talking about and spoke to each other periodically. Even John Backus said, Fortran is not the final interface that we should have.

It keeps spinning in the programming circles half-quoted versions of half-baked quotes from original sources. These pioneers, even when they disagreed, had pretty precise arguments and very rarely feeling the feelies.

[mlajtos]

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498... – How do we tell truths that might hurt? 1975

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.

He told the truth and in turn Fortran corrected its course, but Dijkstra probably didn't change his mind about it.

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> These pioneers, even when they disagreed, had pretty precise arguments and very rarely feeling the feelies.

The feud between Backus and Dijkstra kinda persuaded me of the opposite.

https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...

[tristramb]

He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.