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A comment on Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad. Parent comment

Re:Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad by jrockway on Friday April 02, 2010 @04:09PM (#1237441)
Some of us are old enough to remember when assembler was supposed to rot your brain. When BASIC or COBOL or another compiler was going to make you stupid. When new tools and new abstractions were viewed as scary by some folks.

Who said stuff like this? The outsourced-java-monkeys of yesteryear?

I doubt many computer scientists said this.

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Re:Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad by bigiain on Friday April 02, 2010 @11:22PM (#1238104)
That was a pretty commonly heard perspective from lecturers and tutors when I was studying Comp Sci in ~85 or so - that kids who'd learnt a bit of basic at school (or on their AppleII or ZX81) needed to "unlearn" all their bad habits before they could understand a _proper_ language like Pascal...
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Re:Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad by ubernostrum on Sunday April 04, 2010 @05:58AM (#1239992)
I doubt many computer scientists said this.

"[T]he teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

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