High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! ?The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science? is a 1988 paper by E. W. Dijkstra, which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness. Despite the title, most of the article is on Dijkstra?s attempt to put computer science into a wider perspective within science, teaching being addressed as a corollary at the end. Specifically, Dijkstra made a ?proposal for an introductory programming course for freshmen? that consisted of Hoare logic as an uninterpreted formal system.