Dijkstra wasn’t IO-bound.
He was until he started communicating asynchronously.
Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
141–150 of 229 posts
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#142Dijkstra is a wonderful source of memorable quotes and hot takes from the early days of software. A sampling: > “The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.” (Dijkstra, 1972) > “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (Dijkstra…
Half of his clever quotes are completely bonkers though and have been disproven by history. How many of you are proving your programs correct before entering them into the computer? Because that is the only correct way to program. And remember he disparaged Margaret Hamiltons software methodology. Sure, she helped put a man on the moon, but apparently she did it the wrong way . I suspect geeks like Dijkstra because h…
Alan Kay didn’t claim to invent it. He coined the term. He’ll be the first to tell you he was inspired by Simula.
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-I-made-up-th...
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#143> "Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute. “The rest of the time,” he remarked, “is taken up by thinking.”9 For Dijkstra, writing and thinking blended into one activity. When preparing a new EWD, he always sought to produce the final version from the outset." > "He also never purchased a computer. Eventually, in the la…
> he always sought to produce the final version from the outset
This is definitely a learnable skill. However, it might be a lost art with younger generations. I had a year of high school english that taught this. Most of us kids did fine.
The assignments worked as follows:
- Write an multipage essay on this topic; you have a week. (first quarter, repeat 2-3 times)
- Here is your exam question. You can bring one 3x5" notecard with you tomorrow, but you'll need to write the actual multipage essay in 55 minutes. (second quarter; repeat 2-3 times)
- You will be given a question about the book we read, and will have 55 minutes to write a multipage essay answering the question. No supplementary materials allowed (except the book). (last quarter; repeat 2-3 times)
Grading for things like the overall structure of the essay and sentence flow got stricter as the course progressed. So did grading on reading comprehension.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 WPM really shook me as well. Today we complain about not having enough time to work on our projects, but back in the good old days, as successful as Dijkstra was, got time to spend 3 WPM and still produced close to 7k articles! Astonishing.
Are you really any faster on average? Sure I can type 60 wpm (I haven't measured, but this is a reasonable speed for anyone to obtain with a little practice, maybe I'm only 40, or I might even get to 100), but that is in typing situations where I'm not having to think. If your job is to enter some document into a word processor (a human OCR), or transcribe a recording (human speech to text) then typing speed is your…
I've never measured my thinking speed before. This measurement is intriguing. I feel that speed of thinking will be inversely proportional to the quality of content we write. Also, even if I can think fast and write quickly, I might have to go back and make amendments which can reduce my average thinking speed.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#145I like Dijkstra's quote: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
Maybe I'm stupid, but does he mean that as long as the task at hand is solved it doesn't matter how we categorize it. In the submarine case it would be "move through water", for example. Or is it deeper than that?
Is there something here about the terms being sloppy and unscientific, making the answer somewhat useless? Whatever "swimming" or "thinking" might be, it's not something clearly defined.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “ Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. ” Not sure what he meant by "object-oriented", but he - as the other members of the IFIP - was well aware of Simula 67, and he belonged to the faction that rejected van Wijngaarden's proposal and regarded Simula 67 as "a more fruitful development" [1]. So - if he said or wrote that at all - it's likely related…
> if he said or wrote that at all See “TUG LINES”, Issue 32 [1] > it's likely related to what Kay understood by the term, or the implementation as a dynamically typed, originally interpreted language done at Xerox PARC I think the comment was referring to what they were doing at Xerox PARC - yes. There are more recent writings of him taking jabs at Californian universities for teaching Java to freshmen instead of wha…
[2] doesn’t actually seem to call out California by name, though. It would have been a little unfair if he had, since California’s most famous public university was teaching intro CS with Scheme and SICP at the time.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#147> "Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute. “The rest of the time,” he remarked, “is taken up by thinking.”9 For Dijkstra, writing and thinking blended into one activity. When preparing a new EWD, he always sought to produce the final version from the outset." > "He also never purchased a computer. Eventually, in the la…
In high-school, I had to write an expose... something about the "silver age of Russian poetry" (it's Block, Belyj, Akhmatova, Gipius, Gumiljov etc. if you are interested). It was about 20 pages long, on a typewriter.
It's physically more straining than to type on any computer keyboard, even with very stiff keys. And I didn't know how to touch-type at the time. So, it was pecking with two fingers. With all that said... three words per minute isn't a lot. At all. By the time I was finished typing, I could probably do better than that.
To me, this quote describes someone who rather hates / struggles with technology. I had a bunch of math professors like this: they couldn't draw diagrams to save their lives, they couldn't write formulas in any editor, and so often we'd have very poorly hand-drawn formulas photographed and inserted as images into MS Word documents or similar incomprehensible junk.
This doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at the very narrow field they specialized in, but it usually means they are very bad at virtually everything else adjacent to that field. Also, this often means that they've made their career in academia by being the first person in that narrow field they specialize in.
This is also my impression of Dijkstra: he had some novel, but also kind of low-hanging fruit ideas... at the time when he was almost alone in that field. Had he started today, he'd be very lucky to get a tenured position, but most likely would end up being a TA / dropped out and just do something else. Even though there's still a lot of politics and all sorts of un-meritocratic ways of getting into prestigious positions in academia, you need to be very good. A lot of the times it's being very good at cheating, but there isn't really any more room for greenfield academics who instantaneously propel themselves to the top of the academic hierarchy.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#148Discussed at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24942671 - Oct 30, 2020 with 196 comments
A lot of good discussion in there.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least as I see my colleagues who buy special keyboards to type code faster and still being hellishly unproductive, deleting and rewriting while I prefer to think before typing and have a solution that works when I type it in instead of iterating over solutions that cannot work in the first place. When I type it's fast, I just don't do it so much compared to my peers, but I am more productive delivering working cod…
People buy special keyboards because they enjoy using them, not because they’re faster to type on.
Not if you play videogames, but yeah, for writing code keyboard speed doesn't make a difference.
Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know the last one. That explains why Alan Kay spent a few minutes of one of his OOPSLA talks roasting Dijkstra[0] "I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras" Which, I dunno, feels kind of funny coming from him of all people. https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=342
See https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
Would Dijkstra have tolerated the expression "amour-propre" better than "ego"?