Suggested coding style

[rusi]

It's ambiguous whether Dijkstra is saying anything positive about Latin
 there.

He could be saying “learning Latin would be a useful thing for average
US programmers”.

Or he could be saying “learning any second natural human language – even
one as useless as Latin – will benefit the average US programmer more
than learning another programming language”.

I prefer to think someone as wise as Dijkstra would not be deluded as to
the value of Latin, and lean more toward the latter meaning.

Well if you see the additional lines Chris has added or other personal
correspondences of EWD eg
http://digitalundivide.blogspot.com/2005/12/ewd-personal-reflection.html
Dijkstra clearly has a specific choice of latin.

It is easier to discount your view -- Dijkstra is wise -- than to deny
that Dijkstra was a devoted classicist -- music, languages and
ultimately programming.
And much bigger CSists than you and I -- eg Egon Borger, R W Hamming
etc -- have called Dijkstra a nut.

It seems to me that Dijkstra's quote would become a bit more
meaningful if one went up, so to speak, the class hierarchy. He is
talking of 3 languages -- English, Latin and ones native tongue.
Generalizing (with slight inaccuracy) one could list 3 categories:

a communication language
b sacred/classical language
c mother tongue

Today a is singleton -- {English}
b is roughly {sanskrit, hebrew, arabic, latin, greek}
Each of these categories has a very different function just as Bach
and beatles have different functions.