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.)

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[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?

[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.

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...