What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
Leet code styled interviews
Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
11–20 of 206 posts
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#12It is remarkable how much he contravened modern academic norms: no work to bring in external funding, relatively few papers, very little collaboration, almost no PhD students. It's not an exaggeration to say that a young researcher with these characteristics today would likely get fired from any high-ranked American research university before even coming up for tenure review. Perhaps our modern academic metrics of merit are missing something?
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#13What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
Session types may be up there? Or maybe progress on homomorphic encryption. Also, progress in quantum computing.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#14What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
The older I get the harder it is to time-slot things, but I can think of a few things where much of the interesting work happened in the last ten years (similar to how a lot of pivotal work on GC algorithms happened in the late 90's).
Most of the good work on escape analysis started around ~2010
Rust got us rolling on borrow semantics (I have a feeling the '20s will be remembered as the the golden age)
I'm sure there's a thing or two in or around LLVM that would rank, but I'm not paying close enough attention.
From a 'renaissance' standpoint:
- LZ-family compression algorithms
- Multi-tenant process isolation (containers)
- transport protocols
- Consensus algorithms
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#15Or at least who thought he carried computer science on his shoulders.
He made significant, important contributions. He wasn't the only one. Hoare, Backus, McCarthy... there were a lot of people who made important, fundamental contributions.
Structured programming caught on. Proofs did not, for reasons that would have offended Dijkstra - they took time, and it was actually more valuable (both socially and financially) to produce mostly-working software quickly than to produce proven-correct software slowly.
But he never would have accepted that the real world was that way. He insisted that his approach was correct. As Backus said of him, "This guy’s arrogance takes your breath away."
So: Important contributions? Absolutely. More than anyone else's? Perhaps. Carried computer science on his shoulders? No, but he probably thought he did.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#16What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
Has to be GAN and related ML developments. They're opening up problem spaces where progress had been largely stalled for decades. I don't think they'll be the ultimate solution in this problem space, but I do think they're an important stepping stone.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#17What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
Dependent type theory has been very useful for automated theorem proving and PLT static analysis (Coq, Agda, Idris are languages that POC'd this).
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#18I have wondered what Dijkstra would have said about that most (from my limited view) verification advances nowadays focus on functional programming (dependant types and so forth). I get the feeling he wasn't too fond of functional programming.
Or maybe he even was able to comment on it, I am not sure how far the field had moved while he was still with us. I have searched for it but could find any comment from him on the subject.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#19What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
Real-time ray tracing is finally here, in large part because of much better denoising technology. Similarly many types of stimulation are becoming vastly cheaper and more capable thanks to the use of machine learning. Image synthesis made huge leaps thanks to the invention of GANs in 2013.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#20What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?
The older I get the harder it is to time-slot things, but I can think of a few things where much of the interesting work happened in the last ten years (similar to how a lot of pivotal work on GC algorithms happened in the late 90's). Most of the good work on escape analysis started around ~2010 Rust got us rolling on borrow semantics (I have a feeling the '20s will be remembered as the the golden age) I'm sure there…
> similar to how a lot of pivotal work on GC algorithms happened in the late 90's
Speaking of which, there's been great progress in low-pause garbage collection over the last few years, although it could be said that Azul was doing it a while back.