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What do you think of the language [http://jsoftware.com/ J] as an APL renewal? [[User:Marc Venot|Marc Venot]] 02:24, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
== quote by dijsktra ==
"''APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums". ([[Edsger Dijkstra]])''"
I have removed the quote by dijkstra on the following grounds:
* The criticism was made towards the early versions of APL, particularly targeting its lack of support for structured and modular programming, at a moment where these two disciplines were taking over the world by storm.
* Computer science was an explodind, intensely competitive field at that time, and thus it was then much more common for computer science luminaries to express themselves in ways that might have been customary then, but that today would be less acceptable for a serious researcher.
* Finally, I will cite ''another'' quote by Dijkstra, criticizing another (now well respected) programming language for which I will initially remove the name calling it 'X' (note, please, that I have the greatest respect of Dijkstra's capabilities, and this is just to show that it is easy to obtain a quote supporting almost any topic from any great mind's past):
**"''X had its serious shortcomings: what became known as "shallow binding" (and created a hacker's paradise) was an ordinary design mistake; also its promotion of the idea that a programming language should be able to formulate its own interpreter (which then could be used as the language's definition) has caused a lot of confusion because the incestuous idea of self-definition was fundamentally flawed. [...] My first introduction was via a paper that defined the semantics of X in terms of X, I did not see how that could make sense, I rejected the paper and X with it. My second effort was a study of the X Manual from [Academic Institution] which I could not read because it was an incomplete language definition supplemented by an equally incomplete description of a possible implementation; that manual was poorly written that I coud not take its authors seriously, and rejected the manual and X with it''." (Dijkstra, ''Computer Science: Achievements and Challenges'')
* Guessed which the language is? Right. Lisp. This should throw some light into the issue of how much weight can be given to his previous quote regarding APL. Dijkstra was a genius at computer science, but Iverson's and McCarthy's genius lay somewhere else, in the specific field of languages and systems that help people ''think''. — [[User:Danakil|danakil]] 02:25, Sep 6, 2004 (UTC)
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