Quote o' the Day: Tony Morris and Edsger W. Dijkstra on metaphor and analogy

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Tommy McGuire
Labels: quote, Dijkstra
While poking around Tony Morris' site, I found a fairly nice presentation on monads. In it, he makes a pithy quote which extends another pithy quote from Edsger Dijkstra:
...but the most disorienting thing was that I found myself suddenly submerged in a verbal tradition that was totally foreign to me! [Legal professionals at a "Seminar on Information, Law and Technology"] were on the average very verbose —some even repetitive—, they had a tendency to "reason" by analogy and more than once I felt that speakers cared more about the potential influence of their words than about what they actually said. -- EWD
Metaphors are training wheels that obscure learning opportunities and stall progress (object-oriented programming anyone?). -- Tony Morris
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