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."

Comments

drop this /. thread and read Dijkstra's work

[dankelley]

To enjoy the next hour (or week, or month, ...) set aside this /. thread and enter into a Dijsktra thread.

Just looking at his U texaspublication list is an awesome (pre-1990s meaning) experience. Let your eyes scan it, as they would the Grand Canyon. Then wander around the UTexas site, where many publications are online, and start reading. You'll be a better person for it. And you may experience a thrill of understanding, when you see that his hands hold up so much of today's code, as Shakespeare's hands hold up so much of the language and common experience of the English world.

To get a feel for the span of his life's work, consider his thesis title, "Communications with an automatic computer." The word "automatic" was necessary then, to distinguish it from a person with a calculator. The machine he used in his thesis? It had a 32K memory unit. He divided this into what he called "living" and "dead" memory.

Let's hope that his memory will be of the living variety.

To a man I never shall meet, thank you.

Dijstra's papers from the mid 1970's.

[sbaker]

When I was just fresh out of college back in 1978, a collegue of mine who had been on Dijstras circulation list gave me a large stack of photocopied papers from Dijstra...all written in his own handwriting because he liked to invent his own symbols and found typewriters too limiting. I was working for Philips Research at the time - and I suppose Dijstra was working at Philip's "Math Center" in Eindhoven, Holland.

I've kept a whole boxful of his papers over the years - just because they are so fascinating to browse.

He invented his own programming language for expressing algorithms - but doesn't seem ever to have written a compiler for it. He refers to algorithms his mother came up with...almost every document has something interesting like that.

The notes are written in the most perfect handwriting you've ever seen.

They could have been printed - they are that precise. Then, one of them out of the blue seems to have been written in someone else's handwriting - it's just as amazingly neat though and when you get to the end of it, it says something like: Apologies for the poor handwriting in this note, but my left hand could use some practice. :-)

These cannot be stored as text files without losing most of their historical interest. Maybe I should spend an evening or two to scan them and put them online. There could be no more fitting tribute to the man.

Linux Kernel

[AftanGustur]

Those who actually read the linux kernel source codem probably already knew Dijkstra and his god-like powers in the computer-sciences.

But for those who put their nose in there and juts read the comments, there are some references

Fr example: drivers/scsi/NCR5380.c

goto part2; /* RvC: sorry prof. Dijkstra, but it keeps the rest of the code nearly the same */