The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award (opens a new tab) and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew his ire, for example: He once dubbed Fortran “the infantile disorder” and stated that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.” In justifying his disdain for using computers in his own work, he wrote, “Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.”
I first encountered Dijkstra’s hot takes nearly four years ago, not long after I joined Quanta as a staff writer covering computer science. The subject was new to me — I’d been a physics journalist, and before that a physicist — and I soon learned that most people don’t know how to interpret “computer science writer.” In the broader public discourse, computer science is practically synonymous with programming or coding, but at Quanta we cover the less understood theoretical side of the field. Then I stumbled on my favorite of the many memorable declarations attributed to Dijkstra: Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
To read more, click here.