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

Is Dykstra still relevant today?

[Jack Wagner]

Lets face it, all one has to do is take a quick look at the demand for certain skill sets on the net to get a pretty good feel for what's relevant today and I'm not sure c++ is anywhere on that radar screen. Most of my work as of late has been all Java and c#, with some legacy C programming done (on low level systems only of course, nobody would pay someone by the hour to have app level work done in C these days)

Sometimes I wonder when I hear people complain about how the CS industry tends to shun the old timers when the truth is that a lot of these old timers are trying to hang on to legacy technology like C++ or perl when the industry has moved onto bigger and better things.

If I've learned one thing it's that in IS/IT/CS you either adapt and move on or you end up doing tech support on the midnight shift. Plain and simple. I think Fred Brooks touched on this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" when he said that computer programming will never be a mature field because to excel in it you must always be changing your language focus.

Warmest regards,
--Jack

Re: Subscription not necessary

[Black Parrot]

> In most civilized countries of which I know, fraud (i.e., falsifying information to get access to goods and/or services to which one is not normally entitled) is illegal.

But falsifying information to justify the invasion of another country is OK.