"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"
About this Quote
The context matters. BASIC, designed for accessibility, spread through classrooms and early personal computing as a friendly on-ramp. Dijkstra, a major architect of structured programming, saw that friendliness as a trap. Early BASIC encouraged practices he spent his career fighting: spaghetti control flow, casual use of GOTO, and a style where programs “work” without being intelligible. His claim is less “BASIC is bad” than “early habits harden into permanent cognitive ruts.” Once a student learns to think of code as a sequence of ad hoc jumps and patches, teaching invariants, modularity, and proof-minded clarity becomes remediation, not instruction.
The subtext is gatekeeping with a purpose. Dijkstra is drawing a boundary between programming as craft and programming as engineering. He wants to shame institutions into taking rigor seriously, even if that means fewer people feel immediately included. The cruelty is strategic: exaggeration as a corrective to a culture that rewarded quick results over correctness, and “beginner-friendly” tools over durable mental models.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: How do we tell truths that might hurt? (EWD498) (Edsger Dijkstra, 1975)
Evidence: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (EWD498 (dated 18 June 1975; archive listing shows pp. 129–131 in the bound EWD volume)). This sentence appears in Dijkstra’s own memo/essay “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (EWD498), explicitly dated “18th June 1975” at the end of the document. This is a primary-source Dijkstra text preserved in the UT Austin E.W. Dijkstra Archive (the page you see is a transcription of the original manuscript). The archive’s copyright-detail index also lists EWD498 with page span “129–131” in the compiled EWD volume, which can serve as the closest thing to a page reference if you’re citing the archive’s bound collection rather than the HTML transcription. Other candidates (1) Computer Science Illuminated (Nell B. Dale, John Lewis, 2004) compilation99.5% ... it is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC ; as p... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Dijkstra, Edsger. (2026, February 15). It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-practically-impossible-to-teach-good-59656/
Chicago Style
Dijkstra, Edsger. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." FixQuotes. February 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-practically-impossible-to-teach-good-59656/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." FixQuotes, 15 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-is-practically-impossible-to-teach-good-59656/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2026.
