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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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Hmmm... somebody give me a short description of why 'goto' needed to be 'abolished'?
Surprised they didn't call it the 'Emancipation Compiliation'.
"Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes."
And it doesn't have anything to do with science either. Funny, huh?
Its unfortunate that our field is so young that its pioneers are just now starting to pass on (compared to other sciences such as Physics, Chemistry, etc.).
Yes. Computer science is indeed in its infancy. Dijkstra cleaned up algorithms by eliminating spaghetti code and introducing structured programming. In my opinion, we are still mired deep in the dark ages of computing. If only someone would clean up software engineering by eliminating the algorithm as the basis of software construction.
Do a search on Google for 'synchronous reactive systems' and find out about the next big advance in software engineering.
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Uh no. You overinflate the importance of Gnutella to "current computing". I'd say Xerox PARC for example easily did more for current computing than Gene Kan.
P2P is not a new idea, just an idea whose time has come.
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We're the next group to advance CS/E. We've got to adopt these folks as our mentors and learn all we can from them.
Not just _how_ their stuff works, but _why_ they did it. Fundamental practices 30 years ago are as fundamental today as they were then.
True. But we must also learn why their stuff did not work. Dijkstra learned why the old stuff did not work and changed it. The truth is that we are in a middle of a software reliability and productivity crisis.
Dijkstra did us all a favor by eliminating the cancer of spaghetti code from algorithmic software. Now we need to look further. Are there any more cancerous tumors in software engineering that need to be cut out? I think so.
I think the biggest and nastiest cancer of them all is the practice of basing software construction on the algorithm. We need to abandon our algorithmic past and embrace a signal-based, reactive software paradigm. It took decades before Dijkstra's contributions became widely adopted. I hope we do not repeat the same mistake.
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