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.)

Comments

Subscription not necessary

[Blitzshlag]

You could change the expiration on the temporary cookie they give you to get perminent access. Of course, this would be illegal.

Can someone shed more light on his misc. info?

[garcia]

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.

Re: Can someone shed more light on his misc. info?

[Black Parrot]

> One of my profs said he was giving a speach at Dijkstra's school. He wanted to make sure Dijkstra didn't attend (apperently Dijkstra was an asshole)

I don't know about 'asshole', but he certainly qualified as a curmudgeon. Famously, if he was at a talk and the speaker put up a slide that had more than one color in it, Djikstra would interrupt and ask what the different colors meant. (I actually had an opportunity to see him do that once.)

I have repeatedly heard rumors at second and third remove to the effect that at least some of the CS faculty at Texas found him "very divisive", but the rumors never told me what the context was. Decisions at faculty meetings, I would guess.

But it shouldn't surprise anyone on Slashdot to hear that some CS geniuses have a contrary streak.

Re:Can someone shed more light on his misc. info?

[eli173]

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).

IF he did track what pen he was using, I can think of one possible reason. It was mentioned that these were photocopied and re-photocopied to several generations. During that process it won't be readily apparent what pen he used... but it might show that some pens gave text that withstood the degredation of copying better than others. If the papers that were written with, say, thick pens were the easiest to read 4 copy generations later, he could make a point to use thick pens in the future.

Just a thought. :)

Re: Can someone shed more light on his misc. info?

[Black Parrot]

> Since CS is (or at least should be) learning how to apply known algorithms to problems and the development of new algorithms to solve problems, CS should be very similar to math, and computer scientists ought to seem fairly similar to mathematicians.

For researchers in the 'theory' and 'algorithms' sub-fields of CS, I'd say they are mathematicians. They work with axioms and theorems and stuff just like other mathematicians do.

Other CS researchers are empiricists instead, e.g. most of those who do data mining or statistical natural language processing. And of course there's lots of other stuff in between. (E.g., network researchers may start off with an algorithmic concept but then run simulations to demonstrate their algorithm's effectiveness.)

There's a family of jokes to the effect that PhDs in computer science don't know anything about computers or programming or whatever. In actuality the individual's engagement with computers/programming will vary very much with the sub-field he's in. These days a theorist will need to be able to use LaTeX to write papers and read e-mail to see the conference announcements, but doesn't need to program at all. OTOH someone doing experiments with genetic algorithms will probably write their own code for their experiments, and may even turn into a hardware geek by building beowulf clusters to run the massively CPU-intensive experiments on.

> Most early CS people, as I understand it, were math people with an interest in computers.

I think you can still find a lot of older CS professors with degrees in applied mathematics. Computers were around long before CS departments even existed.

Call for volunteers

[sheck]

The EWD archive is looking for volunteers to convert the handwritten articles to google-able HTML. See here if you are interested.

Subject

[Laxitive]

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

I took a class from him at UT in '93

[wingbat]

> he certainly qualified as a curmudgeon. Famously, if he was at a talk and the speaker put up a slide that had more than one color in it, Djikstra would interrupt and ask what the different colors meant. (I actually had an opportunity to see him do that once.)

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...

Favorite Quote

[handy_vandal]

"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

Re:Compelling?

[sbaker]

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.