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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

#191

Post by mcguire »

bch wrote: post #117
mcguire wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[...] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".) *Tuesday Afternoon Club [0]. [0] https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colo...

Right, Tuesday Morning was the tchotchke store.

It says something about me that I get them confused.

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

#192

Post by amw-zero »

Jtsummers wrote: post #134
amw-zero wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917644 This submission from yesterday may interest you.

Thanks for that.

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

#193

Post by amw-zero »

User23 wrote: post #163
amw-zero wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say he tried to destroy functional programming. If you read his response he pretty clearly says that he just thinks that FP as a solution to all problems is “overselling” the solution. 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 Lampor…

Lamport is a giant and one of the greatest living computing scientists. He's also getting more and more Dijkstra-like. I say that with full admiration.

Even if I don’t use it at work, learning TLA+ has changed the depth of my understanding of software.

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

#194

Post by rramadass »

ativzzz wrote: post #186
rramadass wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cost associated with constructing such proofs ... is too high People assume this is true because it has been repeated endlessly. I think it is an issue of granularity. For example; both Dijkstra's GCL and Hoare's Triples (fine granularity) vs. Meyer's DbC (coarse granularity) can be expressed using Assertions to build Preconditions/Postconditions/Invariants as "correctness proof" throughout a real-world software sy…

You really just made my point with your response > For example; both Dijkstra's GCL and Hoare's Triples (fine granularity) vs. Meyer's DbC (coarse granularity) can be expressed using Assertions to build Preconditions/Postconditions/Invariants as "correctness proof" throughout a real-world software system The average dev at an average company will read this and not understand 90% of your sentence. Again, the vast majo…

I think you are giving too little credit to the "average programmer's" intelligence. He/She is after all a self-learning, problem solving biological machine :-)

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. -- Bjarne Stroustrup

We all were "average programmers" at one time and didn't know better. But at some point some of us came to know(from whatever source) of a "better and correct way" of doing things and then realized that this should have been taught from the beginning. It is not enough to just teach people the syntax of a language and let them loose on the World; we have to be taught "discipline" and how to use it "correctly". In the context of this thread, that was exactly what Dijkstra strongly advocated for (see my other reply to you listing some paragraphs from EWD288).

References (Wikipedia is a good starting point though sometimes overly complicates simple ideas):

* Dijkstra's GCL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarded_Command_Language

* Hoare's Triples - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoare_logic

* Meyer's DbC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

* Assertions/Preconditions/Postconditions/Invariants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assertion_(software_developmen... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precondition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcondition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_(mathematics)#Invari...

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

#195

Post by Delk »

jleyank wrote: post #189
Laakeri wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something wrong in this? Better qualified candidates were preferred for a research job. Of course, if you argue that the job didn't actually require PhD-level knowledge/experience, then the problem is in oversaturated job market of the field, not in the PhD system.

In chemistry "then", and I assume still "now", a MS is viewed as a "failed to complete the PhD" degree unless it comes from a smaller school lacking a PhD program. Or, "wanted to go to Med or Law school and didn't get in". When hiring, BS/MS chemists are seen as a pair-of-hands/technicians. There's a noticeable rank difference in how they enter Pharma - BS/MS with several promotions end up where PhD's walk in the doo…

> In chemistry "then", and I assume still "now", a MS is viewed as a "failed to complete the PhD" degree unless it comes from a smaller school lacking a PhD program.

I don't know which country GGP (or his wife) is from, and you might well be correct about your assessment, but there are some countries where master's degrees are viewed differently than in the U.S.

Where I live and did my degree (Northern Europe), it's commonplace to do a master's rather than just a bachelor's degree. In fact, in many fields the master's used to be considered the basic "undergrad" degree here. A bachelor's degree existed, but in many fields you'd have been considered to have dropped out of completing a master's if you only had bachelor's. That might be slowly changing, with a higher emphasis given to bachelor's level degrees, but the sentiment probably still remains.

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

#197

Post by mschaef »

mcguire wrote: post #95
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Yes, this is why computer science students from schools like ... UT Austin (EWD's stomping grounds) are almost completely unemployable in the software-related industries.

UTCS 1997 here. I've been employed in software-related industries continually since graduation, and I can honestly say my UTCS degree has been nothing but helpful in that regard.

BTW, the personal website listed in your profile is down. You might want to look into that.

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

#198

Post by dragonwriter »

Jtsummers wrote: post #101
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> College (especially the sciences) is not about apprenticeships.

It is and it isn't. Most degree programs don't require it, and some don't integrate it as a for-credit option, but most (including in the sciences) do open opportunities for them, and lots of students take advantage of that opportunity and are more employable because of it.

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

#199

Post by dragonwriter »

jleyank wrote: post #190
Jtsummers wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some folks say the science education system is similar to the Medieval Guild systems: apprentices (grad students), journeymen (postdocs) and various levels of master craftsmen (professors). These are intended as ranks not genders, so s/men/people/g if desired.

Academia (not just, or even especially, in the sciences) is a guild system on those lines, but if you are looking for employment outside of academia, things are a bit different even if you need to go through some part of the academic path for the career entry you are aiming for.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

lou1306 wrote: post #45
andi999 wrote: post #38

Somehow this gives me the impression he is a bit overrated, and he somehow developed a bit of cult-like following.

I genuinely wonder what gave you this impression. Dijkstra made seminal contributions to at least three subfields of computer science: algorithms (his optimal shortest path algorithm), programming languages (ALGOL -with others, but still- and his "goto considered harmful" paper), and concurrency theory (semaphores), just to state the most well-known ones...

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