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Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: 1930-2002
Order writes "Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the famous "Go To Considered Harmful", has died on Aug. 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer."
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I remember when Tulsa U. brought in Dr. Dijkstra back in the spring of 1984. He spoke at length about software design principles, and how design was the lynchpin of good systems. He was there only for a day, and had insisted on taking time out to talk to anyone interested in hearing him. I'm very glad that TU invited the Computer Science students from ORU over to hear him.
The Computer Science profession has lost another giant.
A pity he's gone.
Some links from my article that slashdot rejected some hours ago: the University of Texas announcement has a list of his awards and discoveries. (He taught at UT.) A brief paper (in PDF, it's scanned from a handwritten paper for CACM if I recall) shows his brilliant, clear, and concise methods of thought and writing.
If you ever used an application that made use of shortest-path searching -- say, any real-time strategy game -- then you owe this man a debt of gratitude.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I found the quotes here: http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in:8000/~rkj/dijkstraquotes .html I paste them here in full to counter the slashdot effect.
:-) -->
Some Quotes of Edsger Dijkstra
"Always design your programs as a member of a whole family of programs, including those that are likely to succeed it"
"Separate Concerns"
"A Programming Language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits"
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" (from 1972 Turing Award Lecture)
"Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code"
"Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence"
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
And then my quote
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It's a shame that /. seems to think "Go To Considered Harmful" is Dijkstra's signature achievement. He was profoundly influential in developing the theory of operating systems. He was one of the first proponents of layered design. He also did pioneering work in mutual exclusion (IIRC, he invented semaphores) and deadlock. In short, he is responsible for a lot of the fundamental concepts that we use to build complex systems today.
At the UTexas EWD archive.
If you know him for nothing else, Dijkstra's Semaphores (aka P and V operators) are a fundamental construct in pretty much any parallel processing environment. Many CPU's have Dijkstra's semephores implemented at the hardware level. It's hard to think of anyone else who has such a fundamental construct named after them. OK, maybe 'Booleans' and the long defunct "Hollerith String".
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Hmm... This might be nice, The problem is that Mr Dijkstra's name comes from the northern part of the netherlands. This 'state' or province as we call it has an own language, with different pronouncement. My go at it:
Normal Dutch:
D'ii'kstra: the ij is pronounced a bit strange, it is hard to explain......
Fries:(northern language/accent)
D'ee'kstroa : the ee is pronounced as in english the seperate e but longer.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Although I understand your sentiment, not only did Ted Williams defend his country in two wars, or one war and one "police action", he also did a lot of work for the Jimmy Fund, a charity that supports the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (back then it was called the Children's Cancer Research Foundation). I wouldn't characterize that as someone "who for the most part didn't do a damn thing to really and truly improve our lives."
Facts about Ted Williams and the Jimmy Fund
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
COBOL is for morons.
With respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
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