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Comment on Dijkstra: On the cruelty of really teaching computer science (1988) [pdf]parent

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For me Charlie Parker sums up the necessity of a formal education even if it is not explicitly used in practice: "Master your instrument, master the music & then forget all that & just play."

How very true across so many aspects of life!

Science doesn't happen through formalism. People learn the body of material that's been proven, then they get new intuitions, then afterwards they try to formally prove their insight. This isn't entirely inconsistent with EDW either. A lot of his point is that programmers need to know how to think symbolically, and if you truly prove the correctness of things, you can build the base of knowledge on top of it. If not, you're frequently wondering why things don't work.

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