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

inference-review.com

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

#101

Post by Jtsummers »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #98
mcguire wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why computer science students from schools like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT (well, it's an engineering school, anyway), and UT Austin (EWD's stomping grounds) are almost completely unemployable in the software-related industries. All of the employers learned pretty quickly that they were all grossly incompetent.

First, even UT Austin doesn't run their CS program as EWD would have wanted. See his comments when they switched to Java. Second, I suspect (but cannot prove) that this problem is why computer science grads need a couple of years of close supervision on the job before you can trust them with anything.

They need supervision because they haven't been apprentices gaining practical experience yet. College (especially the sciences) is not about apprenticeships. If you just want "grunt programmer[s]", we need proper apprenticeships and trade schools. Like electronic technicians and plumbers go through.

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

#102

Post by v64 »

znpy wrote: post #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 ?

Actual paper is here: https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/bf01386232

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

#103

Post by mcguire »

As an aside, I took a History of Logic course from Krzysztof Apt (https://inference-review.com/author/krzysztof-apt/) while I was an undergrad and he was briefly at UT Austin. He is an excellent teacher and a very nice man.

(He loaned me a copy of a book on Frege's logic during the course---it had been signed and given to him by the person who let him stay on their floor when he first came to the US.)

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

#104

Post by mcguire »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #98
mcguire wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why computer science students from schools like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT (well, it's an engineering school, anyway), and UT Austin (EWD's stomping grounds) are almost completely unemployable in the software-related industries. All of the employers learned pretty quickly that they were all grossly incompetent.

First, even UT Austin doesn't run their CS program as EWD would have wanted. See his comments when they switched to Java. Second, I suspect (but cannot prove) that this problem is why computer science grads need a couple of years of close supervision on the job before you can trust them with anything.

Fortunately, you can hire newly minted software engineers and they require no supervision whatsoever to solve your difficult problems.

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

#105

Post by dkarl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #98
mcguire wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why computer science students from schools like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT (well, it's an engineering school, anyway), and UT Austin (EWD's stomping grounds) are almost completely unemployable in the software-related industries. All of the employers learned pretty quickly that they were all grossly incompetent.

First, even UT Austin doesn't run their CS program as EWD would have wanted. See his comments when they switched to Java. Second, I suspect (but cannot prove) that this problem is why computer science grads need a couple of years of close supervision on the job before you can trust them with anything.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that this problem is why computer science grads need a couple of years of close supervision

There's more to it than that, a lot of which has more to do with learning how companies are structured and how people communicate in the corporate world. Among other things, college students have been trained to tackle any assignment with the assumption that the information they have been given is accurate and comprehensive, and the professor would prefer to hear nothing from them until the assignment is turned in as complete as possible right before the deadline.

If you want to educate people to be immediately productive in a corporate environment, that's not what college is for anyway.

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

#107

Post by jakespoon »

Backus literally inspired functional programming with his Turing acceptance and Dijkstra attacked him for it. Dijkstra attacked the paper that inspired Haskell and everything else that currently exists in FP. He tried to destroy it. He should be a footnote in history.

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

#108

Post by samatman »

lkuty wrote: post #83
todd8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which reminds me of The Funarg Problem Explained by Joseph Weizenbaum https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10272070... . I used its "diagrams" to understand the closure mechanism (definition vs invocation environments) during the course of a Scheme class in 1996.

A link to the actual paper, for the curious http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/Weizen...

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

#109

Post by todd8 »

geophile wrote: post #78
todd8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yes, that's how "Jensen's Device" is used to implement call-by-name. However, note that the expression passed to an Algol 60 function by name causes the expression to be evaluated in the context of the function being called. Each time the formal parameter appears in the called function the expression passed to that parameter is re-evaluated.

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

#110

Post by thotsBgone »

jakespoon wrote: post #107

Backus literally inspired functional programming with his Turing acceptance and Dijkstra attacked him for it. Dijkstra attacked the paper that inspired Haskell and everything else that currently exists in FP. He tried to destroy it. He should be a footnote in history.

The Whine Law:

There will always be someone in every Hacker News comment section to whine like a baby. Every topic, every thread. Someone will whine.

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