On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science (EWD1036)

TL;DR — Dijkstra’s handwritten 1988 talk arguing that computing is a radical novelty, and that teaching it through analogies to familiar things does students harm.

EWD1036, from Dijkstra’s numbered manuscript series at UT Austin, written in his own hand (30 pages). He argues that we plan tomorrow in yesterday’s vocabulary, stretching old concepts to fit new things, and that this works only for gradual change. Computers, he says, are a radical novelty, so metaphors and analogies mislead. He wants computing science taught as formal mathematics from the start.

What it is: a famous polemic, and one of the best-known EWDs. The scan is handwritten with no text layer.

Where this came from

• r/obscurePDFs post, March 2019 — “1988 paper by E. W. Dijkstra, On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science [30 pages]”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
• Link as posted: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF

30 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.