41–50 of 206 posts
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.
What is an EWD?
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.
What is an EWD?
> 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 made lisp-interpreter and toyed with compiler.
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…
Somehow this gives me the impression he is a bit overrated, and he somehow developed a bit of cult-like following.
Earlier 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…
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 th…
«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 ?
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 re…
What are the greatest advances in CS of the last decade?