Dijkstra's letter "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" is a famous rant with a good deal of rhetorical flair.
In context you can see that he (rather hilariously) savaged some of the most popular commercial programming languages at that time: FORTRAN, PL/I, BASIC, COBOL, and APL.
(Somehow Lisp/Algol/C/Pascal got off unscathed; presumably they weren't popular enough in 1975 - otherwise Dijkstra would undoubtedly have had bad things to say about them as well.)
In context you can see that he (rather hilariously) savaged some of the most popular commercial programming languages at that time: FORTRAN, PL/I, BASIC, COBOL, and APL.
(Somehow Lisp/Algol/C/Pascal got off unscathed; presumably they weren't popular enough in 1975 - otherwise Dijkstra would undoubtedly have had bad things to say about them as well.)
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF