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Dijkstra's Manuscripts Available Online
Bodrius writes "Salon has a short but interesting article called GOTO considered joyful, about E. W. Dijkstra's manuscripts, as published by the University of Texas, and their bloggish nature.
I'm not sure if the blog analogy is that accurate, but the articles are a must read for computer scientists and geeks in general." (Annoying but free click-through system for non-subscribers.)
You could change the expiration on the temporary cookie they give you to get perminent access. Of course, this would be illegal.
Does anyone know if he routinely let people know what type of pen he was using when he wrote that particular document? Here's one of the ones I found.
Why did he do this? For his own personal notes on which pens were good (I guess important if you are frequently writing things).
Why did he use pens and not electronic formats? For a CS person that surprises me.
Well, Dijkstra's Algorithm is pretty relevent, but I don't see what that has to do with what's "on that radar screen". And, in any case, to more properly address your comments- Java is slow, and laughed at. C# is Microsoft (I.e., not open) and less than portable. Furthermore, a lot of CS work is maintaining software, and all the Java knowledge in the world won't help you with the fifty-thousand line FORTRAN program you're getting paid to maintain.
Also, C++ and, as one of your responders aptly noted, Perl are not "legacy technology"- Just because something is old doesn't mean it's out of date. I won't pretend to be qualified to properly extoll the virtues of C++, but if you're really curious, I'm sure you could e-mail one of the C.S. profs here, bs at cs.tamu.edu (Bjarne Stroustrup).
Actually, he is right. For a given value of right. What you are doing when you program may seem simple to you, but mathematically it is incredibly complicated - but you don't notice that because the problem is being treated as a programming problem rather than a mathematical problem in your brain. Good programmers tend to be good mathematicians but they often don't realise it because they haven't been taught maths properly - conventional maths may even be challenging for them, but I've found that this is the result of the way they look at maths as a result of badly thought out corses that try to fit all kinds of brains into one structure.
I've never found someone who is truly bad at maths to be any good at programming, or a good programmer who - with help to change the way they look at maths - to be useless at maths.
The EWD archive is looking for volunteers to convert the handwritten articles to google-able HTML. See here if you are interested.
I had the pleasure of going to a Q&A session with Djikstra hosted by our university CSClub. It was interesting - he talked about shortest path, algol, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
One of the major points he made before he left, and somewhat adamantly at that, was that software is so poor in quality nowadays because developers don't really bother to come up with formal proofs of correctness for their programs.
There was some back and forth from the audience on this point, with people wondering wether it was feasible for large pieces of software (e.g. OS kernels) to be proven, because of their size and complexity. He didn't seem to think that it should really be a problem, and attributed the lack of correctness proofs to laziness on the part of programmers.
It was an interesting talk.
No point to this post, really.
-Laxitive
as you can all see people, this is a great example of the diffrence that exists between a person who knows how to program, and a person who studies Computer Science.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I loved this one. The wolf-goat-cabbage problem will never be the same again.
I transferred from Architecture to Computer Science. People didn't understand how I could like both, and they really didn't understand it when I said they're very similar.
You understand it perfectly.
He was at UT when I did my master's in CS there, and he was certainly a character. When the speaker walked into the room and saw him on the front row, little beads of sweat would immediately begin to form.
I actually took a class from him, which had a vague Latin name he translated for us as "whatever I want to talk about". He was quirky and intimidating but friendly and engaging at the same time.
Some of the interesting things he did:
He took pictures of each of the students (I think there were 7 of us) to file away somewhere. I guess it helped him remember our names.
He used a different hand for writing on the chalkboard on alternate days. Lefty-days were sometimes a bit rough. He had broken his right wrist a year or so before, and wanted to ensure he could still function if it happened again.
The class had no tests and no homework, but featured an open-ended one-on-one "verbal final" at the end of the semester, either in his (large, corner, carpeted, blackboards-on-every-wall) office, or in his home.
The verbal final featured *me* with those little beads of sweat...
"I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, viz. 'How not to make a mess of it', has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed."
E.W. Dijkstra: The end of Computing Science?
Austin, 19 November 2000
-kgj
In each branch of comp sci, you'll find people who will tell you that the others "are not computer science", but IMHO they all are real and useful aspects of the discipline.
I don't consider myself an engineer. The sign on my cube says that I'm a software engineer, but that makes me cringe.
I'm just a computer programmer, which is more like a carpenter than anything. I build things that other people want, just because I know how to do it. I didn't need any special education or certification to do my job, just experience with the tools of my trade. I'm just like a guy with a hammer.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I was one of the people that somehow got onto the mailing list for Dijkstra's notes. It was always a joy to see a photocopy of one of his hand-written (mostly) notes appear in my In-Tray at work.
Unless you've read a good number of his writings, it's hard to appreciate the way this guy thought.
He also had the neatest handwriting in the known universe. I recall getting one of his notes that seemed as immaculately neat as all the others - with a note at the end apologising for the quality of the handwriting as he'd written it with his other hand "because it could use some practice". He resented having to use a typewriter because he liked to invent new symbols. He always wrote code fragments in a programming language of his own invention for which no known compiler exists.
It may be that you could describe this as a 'blog' - it was disseminated by mail to people who he'd somehow run into or been associated with. I have no idea how many copies were sent out - but it must have been hundreds. The earliest ones were long before the advent of the Internet.
Whether it makes a suitable Salon story - I can't say.
www.sjbaker.org