151–160 of 206 posts
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…
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…
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Perhaps. I can't really speak to his career before he came to UT Austin in 1984, he was already very famous (Bjarne Stroustroup at Texas A&M/Columbia or Brian Kernighan at Princeton famous); if I remember, his chair was created for him as a full professor and without many of the usual duties of a professor. (One of his stipulations was that he not be made Chairman of the department.) According to the article, as a yo…
> Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.) Back then, i think full professors were appointed by the Queen. (Certainly so for Beatrix, but he became a prof before her inauguration) Being appointed by the Queen made it really difficult…
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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…
In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.
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…
Given what I've seen of AI today (works reasonably well at the best of times, but is sensitive to unusual cases and can produce totally nonsensical results otherwise; and nearly impossible to actually debug), I remain highly skeptical.
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"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…
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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…
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…
> 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…
The closest analog of call by-name I can think of is Common Lisp macros.
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.