How do we tell truths that might hurt?

Is the title of a pamphlet written by the late Edsger Dijkstra back in 1975. Working in “enterprise development”, I find that most of the stuff is still true. Replace PL/1 and Cobol with J2EE and ABAP or some other “crap du jour” and it will sound still very familiar.

One point I like a lot is the fact that a programmer needs to master his native language exceptionally well (besides from an mathematical inclination). I think this is even more of a problem today, as in the face of outsourcing, we all use English all the time and the so an exceptional mastery of English is also required. Reality is quite different. There is a lot of Europeans and Indians out there in the industry, who are using a very dumbed down Pidgin dialect, which is for sure not adequate for developing complex systems.

I beg to differ though about the effects exposure to BASIC – being a rehabilitated BASIC user myself. Fortunately I was lucky enough to move on to PASCAL, but looking at all the other “real business” programming languages I can see where he comes from.