Dijkstra interview 1985
Q    Speaking of programming bottlenecks—what will the impact of the research in artificial intelligence be?
A    Can you research something that is not science? I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.
Q    Computer science has become very popular, are there too many students, are there too few students—and do you see any change in the level of preparedness of the entering student between now and say ten years ago?
A    The topic is devastatingly popular. Because computing is now supposed to cure all the ills of the world and more. I once gave a short summary of the fact that over the centuries scientific effort had been a complete disaster. The first scientific effort of course was the production of the elixir that would give eternal youth, but very rapidly they discovered that there was little point in living eternally, if you would live in eternal poverty, so the next major scientific project was how to turn anything into gold. Now it was quite clear that the planning of these two major research efforts was beyond the powers of the seers of the day, so for sound managerial reasons the next hot issue became the accurate prediction of the future. As time went by the original goals were forgotten. Medicine divorced itself from quackery, chemistry divorced itself from alchemy and astronomy divorced itself from astrology. However there is still some feeling of guilt in the academic community, because as soon as promising new branch of science or technology emerges, it is saddled up with the old hopes. The current boom in computing is an immediate reflection of absolutely unrealistic hopes. So if you ask whether there are too many or too few students: an order of magnitude too many. From a scientific point of view you would like to weed out the lot. Keep the brightest 2% and do business. The current generation of freshmen coming in is not only ill prepared, they have been misguided.
Q    Are you suggesting that the personal computer boom has fostered fruitless play rather than ....
A    Yes. I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools.
Q    So what will get in?
A    Probably Basic.
Q    Of other languages that are becoming popular, are there any that offer any better hope?
A    Oh yes. The popularity of Pascal is very encouraging. Not because it is ideal, but it is definitely orders of magnitude better than any of its competitors. Besides that it is interesting because it is a one man product, without any form of political or industrial backing. It has gained its popularity in slightly over a decade, because at the time of its inception it was so much better than anything else available.
Q    We have seen Lisp emerge in documenting constructs?
A    Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran.