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Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

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Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#21

Post by nurettin »

xenocyon wrote: post #12

It 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 me…

It would be very funny to watch foremost experts in relatively new fields being denied because they don't have phd students. I somehow doubt this is the case, though.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#22

Post by marcosdumay »

xenocyon wrote: post #12

It 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 me…

> 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.

He wouldn't even get in an university to get the chance to be fired. And that's not specific to the US, it applies to nearly all developed or developing countries.

That person wouldn't be able to get much past a PhD, even as a student.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#24

Post by hinkley »

xenocyon wrote: post #12

It 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 me…

People used to say of my alma mater that the teaching was decent but the facilities were amazing.

There was a feel on campus that the people who were really going to 'make it' were only putting in B- or C+ work and spending the rest of their time working on side projects. There were very few days in a given year when more than half of the computer labs were full at the same time, and with Unix boxes you can always remote in to the flavor of machine you need.

You don't need much research budget if you already have access to time on equipment. I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#26

Post by macintux »

hinkley wrote: post #14
amelius wrote: post #6

What 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…

Related to consensus: CRDTs

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#27

Post by marcosdumay »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #15

Or 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)…

Well, static types and analysis are in fashion now, and always moving on the direction of more powerful proof systems.

He was very likely too much ahead of his time on that. Decades after him we still don't have good enough tech to do the kinds of proof he expected... And yes, maybe too arrogant to realize that it's not the entire world that is dumb, but it's a core piece of the system that is missing.

On the other hand, he did work to improve proof systems, so who knows what he really thought?

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#28

Post by Ericson2314 »

olodus wrote: post #18

I 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…

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...

Actually, based on the above I think he would have been all for it.

Well, I mean knowing Dijkstra he would have found something to complain about :D, but it wouldn't have been that it wasn't imperative enough!

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#29

Post by hinkley »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #20
hinkley wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some would say the GC advances in the 90's were a renaissance, but I think I'd agree we are in the middle or tail end of a second one.

Many of those 90's GC algorithms complained of a lack of a cheap instruction for write barriers, and some were specifically about amortizing write barriers by using coarser grained ones. Azul's pivot to software only solutions came on the shoulders of Intel's VT instruction set, which allows, among other things, for nesting of virtual memory. The Azul JVM essentially behaves as a VM.

[ETA] and some of the other GCs now leverage the vast open space of 64 bit addressing to alias memory addresses to give references 2 or 3 flavors, and use that to coordinate parallel GC activities.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#30

Post by wilsonthewhale »

Someone wrote: post #9
nickdrozd wrote: post #2

> ALGOL 60 included a series of novel features, such as recursion, which was supported in a much more complex manner than logicians had ever envisaged...Recursive procedures in ALGOL 60 are much more complex than in Lisp. Can anyone explain how this "much more complex" recursion works?

I think this refers to making the implementation efficient. They wanted performance on par with existing languages that didn’t allow recursion, and could simply assign fixed addresses to all function arguments and local variables. Lisp didn’t have that. It allocated environments left and right. That meant that a function call allocated memory and potentially could trigger garbage collection. The major improvement was…

Do you have any references or papers that developed the idea of having a stack at runtime? I love reading into the fundamentals of modern computing.
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