131–140 of 206 posts
One fun item I'm lucky enough to own is a core memory stack from Dijkstra's Electrologica computer, ca.1958 or so -- very low density obviously. This machine is where the first working Algol compiler was written.
How do you come across something like that?
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Knuth also starts his book by defining his own assembly language and computer architecture.
Because at the time he wrote it there wasn't a good standard or sufficiently common one that had the properties he wanted to use for exploring algorithms. See MMIX for something closer to a modern architecture than the original MIX.
I read Dijkstra's goto considered harmful in college, circa 1970. I was a young programmer at the time, and it made me think and reconsider how and why big programs were often hard to understand. Years later, in grad school, my research was on program verification. Dijkstra was a big influence on the field. I attended a lecture at UT Austin that he gave before moving to the US. Dijkstra's approach to proving the corr…
There’s no checking to see if your specification is under-specified.
I read Dijkstra's goto considered harmful in college, circa 1970. I was a young programmer at the time, and it made me think and reconsider how and why big programs were often hard to understand. Years later, in grad school, my research was on program verification. Dijkstra was a big influence on the field. I attended a lecture at UT Austin that he gave before moving to the US. Dijkstra's approach to proving the corr…
This is such a great and actually important comment. I’ve been obsessed with program correctness / verification for a while now. It just seems like the holy grail that we can’t fully attain yet. But you keep bumping into certain walls, and the fact that correctness can only be relative to a given specification is a profoundly huge wall. There’s no checking to see if your specification is under-specified.
This submission from yesterday may interest you.
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.
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.
And I 100% agree. Thinking that functional programming solves all problems is a fundamental misunderstanding of computation.
The first thing that opened my eyes to the overselling of FP as a panacea was reading Leslie Lamport’s work, specifically Computation and State Machines: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/state-machine.pdf. Specifically, in Section 3: Programs as State Machines, he demonstrates how the same algorithm for computing factorials can be implemented via mutation or recursion.
With TLA+, Lamport also showed that mutation and state can be reasoned about mathematically, contrary to the central claim of functional programming purists.
The point is simple: functional programming doesn’t in any way _inherently_ help with correctly implementing programs. The fact that FP is currently in vogue is simply another example of how humans don’t require any evidence of anything at all before following a belief system blindly.
FP does prevent certain classes of mistakes from happening, i.e. unintentional bugs due to mutation creating implicit state machines. But preventing bugs and aiding in correctness aren’t exactly the same thing.
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Functional programming already existed in a few forms by the 1977 Turing Award lecture. ML was around since 1973, which defined the ML family (Ocaml, SML, F#) and influenced Haskell and others. The Lisp family of languages had been around since 1958. Some parts of the lecture can be seen as related to languages in the APL family (originated in 1965). These developments influenced the lecture itself. To gain context i…
So, looking back from 2020, did Backus oversell it? We aren't there yet but it still looks like the right direction to me.
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Not at all true. The Dutch are famously known to be blunt and direct which seems to be a national trait(eg: https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/dutch-culture-brutal... ). Think of Dijkstra as Sherlock Holmes thought of himself; viz. My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self…
I Northern European/Germanic trait in general. As a Norwegian living in the Netherlands I found Dutch people very easy to relate to but I know many of my other fellow foreigner had major problems with their direct communication. But you see the same with Linus Thorvalds. His tone offends a lot of people in particular Americans. But as a fellow Nordic I think the passive aggressiveness often observed in America or fak…
The Norse God spirit of Linus Torvalds.
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> 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…
This is the difference between computer science and software engineering. And the vast majority of people who graduate with a CS degree are going to work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. They are therefore being mis-educated to the degree that their CS program agrees with Dijkstra's philosophy. (Which doesn't mean that Dijkstra is wrong about CS. It just means that a CS degree shouldn't be the passp…
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I Northern European/Germanic trait in general. As a Norwegian living in the Netherlands I found Dutch people very easy to relate to but I know many of my other fellow foreigner had major problems with their direct communication. But you see the same with Linus Thorvalds. His tone offends a lot of people in particular Americans. But as a fellow Nordic I think the passive aggressiveness often observed in America or fak…
do you know of any media that has good depictions of this kind of culture? Ideally as part of the show, rather than a one-off foreigner in an American show. As an American this is how I sometimes wish our culture was like, but at the same time I realize I can't even imagine the reality of it since our culture can be rather extremely towards the opposite end of the spectrum
This reminds me one thing I find irritating about SF in general and SF movies in particular. They hardly portrait technology use in an organic way. Do you want to see a great SF movie? Watch a current normal movie with 1990s eyes. People will text, call her friends, use Uber, buy on Amazon but nothing self conscious " See? See how cool is what I am doing!?"