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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

#71

Post by joe_the_user »

baxrob wrote: post #51
qazpot wrote: post #25

Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-dijkstra. - Alan Kay

"This quote keeps on showing up out of context. Edsger and I got along quite well." - Alan Kay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796926

Well, the whole comment you link doesn't really deny that Dijkstra could be arrogant and dismissive, it just goes on to say essentially that he was a lovable old coot and that they listened to him only as much as they wanted; "Dijkstra was much more funny than annoying for anyone who had any sense of self. The two biggest problems in our not-quite-a-field were those who listened to him too carefully and those who didn't listen to him carefully enough."

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

#72

Post by jes5199 »

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…

his papers are quite good though, and he did a lot of writing, just not for journals

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

#73

Post by mysterydip »

I wish seeing the name Dijkstra didn't immediately remind me of his oft-quoted BASIC comment:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

The problem is it's quoted regardless of how much the BASIC dialect being discussed resembles the one he was talking about [1]. There are lots of good BASIC languages out there running all kinds of useful software that are dismissed out of hand by a subset of developers simply from that comment.

[1] https://programmingisterrible.com/post/40132515169/dijkstra-...

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

#74

Post by ben7799 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #71
baxrob wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This quote keeps on showing up out of context. Edsger and I got along quite well." - Alan Kay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796926

Well, the whole comment you link doesn't really deny that Dijkstra could be arrogant and dismissive, it just goes on to say essentially that he was a lovable old coot and that they listened to him only as much as they wanted; " Dijkstra was much more funny than annoying for anyone who had any sense of self. The two biggest problems in our not-quite-a-field were those who listened to him too carefully and those who di…

I read it more like people back then weren't so sensitive and didn't even take that kind of straight talk as arrogance and dismissiveness.

But then maybe Alan Kay will show up and clarify.

I'm just old enough to remember when corporate culture was like this too. It used to be OK to say when people were wrong or get mad when programming errors lit the building on fire. That started to become NOT OK in the past 15 years. A lot of older engineers really had to to work hard to adapt because it's so frustrating today when people make careless mistakes over and over again and no one can say a word without being accused of not being a team player or something.

People were more likely to admit their own mistakes then too. In that environment it was better to come clean then try to hide a mistake even when coming forward can solve the problem faster.

We've overcorrected this stuff.. correcting it helps make the field more inclusive but at some point after we're diverse and inclusive we need to walk some of this behavior back a bit.

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

#75

Post by galaxyLogic »

_Nat_ wrote: post #64
elvis70 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Humble Programmer" is an exercise in self-mockery, as Dijkstra has always been very conscious of the value of his work. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...

Good read! That said, I don't know about self-mockery. A good line from the linked lecture transcript: > The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. He seems to be addressing the issue of inflated egos influencing people to be " real programmers ". F…

That is good stuff (well he was Dijkstra). I think we've all seen such hubris play out. When you want to prove that you are intellectually superior you will demonstrate that you can master the most difficult tools (say category theory?) without understanding that your real goal should be to find simple solutions to difficult problems.

A simple solution does not look like much because it is so simple, but it can take a genius to come up with it. Whereas complicated solutions are easier to come by and do demonstrate your intellectual skills.

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

#76

Post by random3 »

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…

One of my past career pet peeves was not being able to work in the same team with some people I was really excited to work daily with. I almost joined the research group, passed interviews, got accepted, but eventually everything got stalled because some "credentials" weren't there.

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

#77

Post by datalus »

mschaef wrote: post #65
hinkley wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches. Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there, but that wasn't really what his research was about. He wrote longhand (scans here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ ) and didn't really use much technology directly in his work. This…

Hamilton Richards (maintainer at the time of the EWDs on the site) was my analysis of programs professor at UT. I had arrived there in 2003 as a freshman, the reverence and impact of Djistrka was incredibly palpable.

I remember some of my classmates were turned off by how theoretical some of the core courses were. A lot of people saw it as less practical. Also the height of Java's OO take over of CS programs, it was definitely a mix of classes. Although the theory courses tended to either care less about language choice or focused on Haskell.

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

#78

Post by geophile »

todd8 wrote: post #60
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?

Early LISP implementations used dynamic scope. This means that non-local references in a function search for the variable's binding in the call chain: if A calls B then when B uses nonlocal variable x it refers to the x in A, not necessarily the x that belongs in the lexical parent of B as seen in the source code. (Unlike C, Algol/Pascal/LISP can all define functions inside of other functions. These nested function d…

I may be fuzzy on this, it's been a long time. But isn't by-name a special case of passing a function? (And then referencing the parameter in the called procedure invokes the function.)

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

#79

Post by galaxyLogic »

ben7799 wrote: post #74
joe_the_user wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the whole comment you link doesn't really deny that Dijkstra could be arrogant and dismissive, it just goes on to say essentially that he was a lovable old coot and that they listened to him only as much as they wanted; " Dijkstra was much more funny than annoying for anyone who had any sense of self. The two biggest problems in our not-quite-a-field were those who listened to him too carefully and those who di…

I read it more like people back then weren't so sensitive and didn't even take that kind of straight talk as arrogance and dismissiveness. But then maybe Alan Kay will show up and clarify. I'm just old enough to remember when corporate culture was like this too. It used to be OK to say when people were wrong or get mad when programming errors lit the building on fire. That started to become NOT OK in the past 15 year…

Part of the reason may be the advent of online. It is much easier to offend people online than in person for several reasons: 1. You do the offending in public 2. You can not get and give immediate feedback on how what you're saying affects your counter-part 3. What you say is carved in stone

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

#80

Post by Jtsummers »

dryrunes wrote: post #36
Jtsummers wrote: post #31

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?

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/welcome.html

That's the archive, talked about in the linked article. Letters (mostly) that he wrote and sent out to people. Today we'd consider their content and length equivalent to a technical blog. Some were much longer, though.

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