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**"''X had its serious shortcomings: what became known as "shallow binding" (and created a hacker's paradise) was an <b>ordinary design mistake</b>; 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 <b>the incestuous idea</b> of self-definition <b>was fundamentally flawed</b>. [...] My first introduction was via a paper that defined the semantics of X in terms of X, <b>I did not see how that could make sense</b>, 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 <b>I coud not take its authors seriously</b>, 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)
== quote by David Given ==
Is the "shuffling cards in four characters" quote true, or is it just a joke? If the former, the four characters should be given in the article; if the latter, maybe a comment to that effect would be nice.
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