If your opinion of Dijkstra is mostly negative and the result of reading others' opinions or selective readings of his EWDs (some of which are incredibly negative in tone), it would behoove you to read his EWDs. Just go through the archive and grab random ones based on title, then later do a more systematic reading of them.
Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#32It 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…
That reminds me of the anecdote where one of Google’s hiring committees realized that they wouldn’t have gotten hired had they been judged by their own standards. It makes you wonder how much talent gets filtered out when we apply very stringent metrics to grade candidates.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#33A well written portrait of a truly great and original "Scientist" in the true sense of the term.
I have always wondered why his approach of constructing correctness proof along with the implementation never really caught on. I think it was what allowed him to come up with his novel algorithms. Have we lost something of the real essence of logical thinking here? Perhaps the paper mentioned in the article; Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs which he was vehemently against, will give me the other side of the argument.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Dijkstra's paper "Recursive Programming" (1960) is where he lays out his proposal for implementing recursive Algol-60 subroutines with a stack: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/INF102-S18/readings/07_dijk...
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#35«Edsger W. Dijkstra, “Recursive Programming,” Numerische Mathematik 2 (1960): 312–18, doi:10.1007/bf01386232. »
The link brings to a paywall. FFS do they really have the courage to ask 42,64€ for a paper from 1960 ?
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#36If your opinion of Dijkstra is mostly negative and the result of reading others' opinions or selective readings of his EWDs (some of which are incredibly negative in tone), it would behoove you to read his EWDs. Just go through the archive and grab random ones based on title, then later do a more systematic reading of them.
What is an EWD?
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#37> 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?
The answers to this question are extremely interesting and show how much work has been done to get where we are today, a position I took for granted and never really understood until now (even in name: 'yo-yo list', for heaven's sake!)
It's a bit like parsing, these days we either reach for a technique (eg. recursive descent) or an implementation of a tool (such as flex/bison) and never think there was a time before these where people had to struggle conceptually with these things.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#38Somehow this gives me the impression he is a bit overrated, and he somehow developed a bit of cult-like following.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#39It 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…
They sure do.
Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... );
Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
#40> 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…
I'm not sure that's fair. If you have objects that escape downwards (so X calls Y, y creates some item i, i gets returned to X) then you can't have a stack. i may be overwritten at the next call of anything else, as the stack grows over it.
I guess they do escape analysis and where items are provably local, stack allocate them. If not, plonk them on the heap.
A call frame is an object like any other, so they go on the heap. This allows you to create closures.