On the necessity of removing 'cruelty' from the teaching of computing

Abstract

In his famous article [1] Edsger Dijkstra reflected upon how cruel it would be truly to teach computer science. For some reason the CS community over the years have taken the sadistic element of his entreaties to heart. Why is this so? Does it have intuitive appeal to those CS educators who believe in the "hard man" school of computer science and the "real programmers don't eat quiche" model of education?