Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

cs.utexas.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#11

Post by iamcurious »

enriquto wrote: post #8
berkes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Texas? He's from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He worked and lived most of his life in The Netherlands and lived and worked about 15 years in Texas, according to Wikipedia.

Sure! but if you read the texts you'll see that he sort of "adopted" a Texan persona when living there.

Haha, maybe a bit. But he was also very conscious of the different mindsets between Europe and America (and he firmly stood in the European mindset). Read "on the fact that the atlantic has two sides"

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#12

Post by cafard »

rramadass wrote: post #6

Great article! I always have Edsger Dijkstra on a pedestal. The reason is his uncompromising attitude and biting wit in getting his beliefs across. I believe it is the only way to advance "Scientific Temperament". As Sherlock Holmes observes; Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shad…

I disagree about the reason. Dijkstra is too often remembered as an insult comic, in the same way that it is too easy to remember Schopenhauer as the guy who said snotty things about Hegel, Schelling, etc.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#13

Post by bordercases »

romesmoke wrote: post #5

Who computer scientists of today could, in your opinion, be considered Dijkstra's spiritual successors?

The key insight of Dijkstra is that we should use a kind of substitution calculus to derive programs from invariants.

From Dijkstra's time we've seen partial adoptions and spinoffs from these insights. Using lambda calculus and static types gets you program behavior that looks a lot like refinement calculus and invariants (since types label domains that are equivalent to predicate sets, and lambda calculus computation is the substitution model).

For that reason I would say that the spiritual successor's to Dijsktra are in the functional programming community, particularly Haskell and Scala: Erik Meijer, Richard Bird, Martin Sapolsky, etc.

Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science curriculum is also fairly integrated across the board to use this style of programming and mathematics.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#14

Post by doesnotexist »

Dijkstra had a unique format for his undergraduate class where the entire grade basically came down to an interview at the end of the semester. During which he asked you to work out a solution to a problem in front of him one on one. A friend had the most memorable interaction with him during the interview/final exam. Dijkstra explained the problem and they began furiously writing out a solution in pencil getting a few lines into the proof before realizing they had made a mistake and began to erase what was written. Dijkstra responded "tsk tsk tsk, you are a rash mathematician" and advised the student to "Use a pen instead of pencil it will encourage you to spend more time with your thoughts before writing."

A couple years later I saw a quote that reminded me of that interaction and it goes “I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.”

Dijkstra's ghost haunts us all.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#15

Post by tda »

doesnotexist wrote: post #14

Dijkstra had a unique format for his undergraduate class where the entire grade basically came down to an interview at the end of the semester. During which he asked you to work out a solution to a problem in front of him one on one. A friend had the most memorable interaction with him during the interview/final exam. Dijkstra explained the problem and they began furiously writing out a solution in pencil getting a f…

The exam in interview form is called an oral examination (vs written examination) and in my university in the Netherlands they were not that rare, especially for exams in the senior years where class sizes are smaller.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#16

Post by munificent »

berkes wrote: post #7
enriquto wrote: post #4

Very interesting document, and many new photos! Love how Knuth explains how he had to be cautious around Dijkstra. He was truly the Chuck Norris of computing (badass, beard, and from Texas).

From Texas? He's from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He worked and lived most of his life in The Netherlands and lived and worked about 15 years in Texas, according to Wikipedia.

Not every Texan has the luxury of being born there.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#17

Post by microtherion »

tomcam wrote: post #3

Lovely. My favorite is by Klaus Wirth. One passage: > Occasionally he used a long “reading pipe”, until once, deep in thought, he bumped it into a door and hurt himself in the throat. Then he switched to cigarettes.

Wirth also did not shrink back from laying out some of his philosophical differences with Dijkstra:

"One of Edsger’s most peculiar idiosyncrasies (after 1970) was his vow never to use a computer."

"Edsger had contributed significantly to a well-founded, rigorous approach to programming, in establishing it as an engineering science. I therefore awaited eagerly the appearance of a textbook, a fundamental guide to programming from his pen. But he had lost his interest in this endeavor, and instead concentrated exclusively on mathematical treatments and theories."

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#18

Post by User23 »

cafard wrote: post #12
rramadass wrote: post #6

Great article! I always have Edsger Dijkstra on a pedestal. The reason is his uncompromising attitude and biting wit in getting his beliefs across. I believe it is the only way to advance "Scientific Temperament". As Sherlock Holmes observes; Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shad…

I disagree about the reason. Dijkstra is too often remembered as an insult comic, in the same way that it is too easy to remember Schopenhauer as the guy who said snotty things about Hegel, Schelling, etc.

In my observation the people that remember him as an insult comic have only the most superficial acquaintance with the man and his work.

That said, his non-technical EWDs can be pretty cutting. He didn't suffer those whom he saw as fools gladly. At least in his writings his humor is extremely dry.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#19

Post by User23 »

rramadass wrote: post #6

Great article! I always have Edsger Dijkstra on a pedestal. The reason is his uncompromising attitude and biting wit in getting his beliefs across. I believe it is the only way to advance "Scientific Temperament". As Sherlock Holmes observes; Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shad…

Dijkstra has been an intellectual hero of mine as well. His book A Discipline of Programming pretty much completely altered my perspective of programming and reading through the majority of the English language EWDs was a very rewarding experience. I love his proof format. He was one of those rare geniuses who bothered to make his process public. His contempt for what he calls "rabbits"[1] is an expression of that devotion to intellectual honesty.

[1] A rabbit in this context is a result that is a surprise, as if it had been pulled out of a hat.

Re: A commemoration of Edsger Dijkstra [pdf]

#20

Post by User23 »

romesmoke wrote: post #5

Who computer scientists of today could, in your opinion, be considered Dijkstra's spiritual successors?

Leslie Lamport immediately comes to mind. His work extending predicate transformers for concurrency[1] is a good example.

Edit: Tony Hoare isn't a successor, but he's a living genius who shares many of Dijkstra's inclinations.

[1] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-win.pdf

Post reply on HN