[Edu-sig] re: Notes from "Daddy, Are We There Yet?"

[Arthur]

I had written -

 >Wonderfully interesting exchange.  Especially the "exchange" part.

And which led me to this essay by Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975

"How do we tell truths that might hurt"

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

I like the tone, more than I probably should.

To those who have studied CS in some formal way Dijkstra might be old hat.

The fun for me is that so much of this old hat stuff is new ground.

It does stike me that in all the discussion here about mathematics and 
programming, mathematics vs programming, programming with and without 
mathematics - there has never been a reference to the insistence of 
someone like Dijkstra that programming is plain and simple a branch of 
applied mathematics - in fact the most difficult one.

"The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific 
comnputations".

Which rings true.  If I am understanding the point, anyway.  PyGeo is in 
a sense a program to do technical/scientific computations (and draw 
them).  It makes sense that as a beginner, I tackled what was easiest.

Again, if I am understanding the point correctly, it lends support to a 
notion of starting with programming and computational mathematics. 
Because it is the easiest, and that, under common sense ideas, is 
normally where one starts.

Art