I selected some of the paragraphs from EWD 1036, written by Edsger W. Dijkstra, and recited them here. If you are seeing this for the first time, I highly recommend to read the manuscript in full.
[Page 2] Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed it it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue.
[Page 5] How many educational texts are not recommended for their appeal to student's intuition! They constantly try to present everything that could be an exciting novelty as something as familiar as possible. … The educational dogma seams to be that everything is fine as long as the student does not notice that he is learning something really new.
[Page 11] A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyze that what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot".
[Page 15] I prefer to describe it (the program) the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs.
[Page 20] So, if I look into my foggy crystal ball at the future of computing science education, I overwhelmingly see the depressing picture of "Business as usual". The universities will continue to lack the courage to teach hard science, they will continue to misguide the students, and each next stage of infantilization of the curriculum will be hailed as educational progress.
[Page 21] My next linguistical suggestion is more rigorous. It is to fight the "If-this-guy-wants-to-talk-to-that-guy" syndrome: never refer to parts of programs or pieces of equipment in an anthropomorphic terminology, nor allow your students to do so. … The reason for this last suggestion is that the anthropomorphic metaphor — for whose introduction we can blame John von Neumann — is an enormous handicap for every computing community that has adopted it. I have now encountered programs wanting things, knowing things, expecting things, believing things, etc., and each time that gave rise to avoidable confusions. The analogy that underlies this personification is so shallow that it is not only misleading but also paralyzing.
[Page 25] Deal with all elements of a set by ignoring them and working with the set's definition. … Deal with all computations possible under control of a given program by ignoring them and working with the program. We must learn to work with program texts while (temporarily) ignoring that they admit the interpretation of executable code.
[Page 30] Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that is what education is about. Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.