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Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

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Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#191

Post by [deleted] »

microtherion wrote: post #180
Jtsummers wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Have you read his EWDs? They're quite interesting and he comes across as far more humble than many people seem to imagine him as. Blunt in his criticism, certainly, but not self-agrandizing or boastful.

Yes, I read numerous EWDs, starting roughly 40 years ago. Many of them are indeed interesting (even, or maybe particularly the gossipy parts). The problem is not that he self-aggrandizes or is boastful; it's that he keeps tearing other people down. And that he was very willing to offer sweeping pronouncements on matters that he had no practical experience in. He basically stopped touching computers in the early 1970s…

[deleted]

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#193

Post by biggestbrain1 »

Twisol wrote: post #185
biggestbrain1 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.

It would be kinder to assume that "I think about how to solve the problem" doesn't capture the nuances of actually doing that thinking to the satisfaction of the commenter, and this is their attempt to articulate it to match their experience. The process of "understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" closely matches the way I approach problems. If you don't feel inclined…

"understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" That is the definition of problem-solving. If there was any nuance in the original comment, we both failed to find it.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#194

Post by coldtea »

biggestbrain1 wrote: post #177
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain. I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that…

This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.

Yeah, in the same way that Moby Dick is a "verbose and ridiculous way of saying "A guy holds a grudge against a whale", and Birth of the Cool is the same as the 8-bit chiptune cover.

The cliff notes summary is not the same as what the parent tries to convey. The nuance in what the parent wrote was the thing that went wooosh.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#195

Post by [deleted] »

biggestbrain1 wrote: post #193
Twisol wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be kinder to assume that "I think about how to solve the problem" doesn't capture the nuances of actually doing that thinking to the satisfaction of the commenter, and this is their attempt to articulate it to match their experience. The process of "understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" closely matches the way I approach problems. If you don't feel inclined…

"understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" That is the definition of problem-solving. If there was any nuance in the original comment, we both failed to find it.

[deleted]

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#196

Post by ontouchstart »

airstrike wrote: post #139
borlanco wrote: post #97

There are more anecdotes about Dijkstra in this collection of testimonials written by his friends, colleagues, and students: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03392 . These are some of my favorites: From Tony Hoare: They removed recursion from Algol 60, on the grounds of its alleged inefficiency. Edsger's answer was that recursion was a useful programming tool, and every workman should be allowed to fall in love with their…

From EWD387: > The other two speakers that gave three one-hour lectures, Dr. McKay from IBM, Yorktown Heights and Professor Engelbart, SRI, Menlo Park, were both terrible. McKay spoke undiluted IBMerese for three full hours and I am not going to give any further comments; I only heard the first hour —like many participants— and that was enough (too much). Because I had an urgent letter to write I missed Engelbart's f…

Wow

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#197

Post by coldtea »

hardasspunk wrote: post #54
archixe wrote: post #43

> "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…

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.

An 800 word opinion article can absolutely take 4 hours for a journalist to write, and that's 3.3 WPM.

And we're talking journalistic opinion piece, which are a dime a dozen, not deeply nuanced scientific writing. If anything Dijkstra was writing his notes too fast and loose!

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#198

Post by [deleted] »

Twisol wrote: post #187
tbalsam wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am rather autistic and this is how I think, toosies. 90-95% of my time working on a project is just sitting, staring into space, completely unaware of the world around me. I think it's because while you can "explore the field" with compute, as it were, the informational shapes of whatever the problem is at hand are always there, and usually they are _much_ more simple than people seem to let on, IMPO. I'm not reall…

You've described something extraordinarily similar to my own mental topology for processing problems. I'm also autistic, although I think our sensitivities differ somewhat. I also try to (and mostly succeed at) hold a whole problem in my head at once. This made me fairly successful at architecting software systems with many moving parts, but it's an incredible drain on my energy, and I would sometimes find myself so…

[deleted]

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#199

Post by AndrewKemendo »

biggestbrain1 wrote: post #177
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain. I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that…

This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.

Why does my description threaten you??

Re: Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

#200

Post by User23 »

mcguire wrote: post #179
User23 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with unrestricted GOTO isn’t that they’re never useful or that bad people use them. The problem is specifically that they make predicate transformer semantics (and probably other formalisms) pragmatically useless. For example in a language without GOTO inside an if statement the guarding condition is known to be a predicate (at least until another operation changes it) whereas in a language with unrestric…

Whenever GOTO comes up, I have to mention Knuth's beautiful paper that was part of that argument: "Structured Programming with go to Statements" (1974). Some quotes: " At the I F I P Congress in 1971 I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Eiichi Goto of Japan, who cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated. " " For many years, the go to statement has been troublesome in the definition of correctness proofs…

Indeed, which is why I offered the pragmatic qualifier. It easily follows that the weakest precondition for L is that at least one of the weakest preconditions for every goto to that L holds. One can possibly do even better with some kind of flow analysis. The issue isn't that it's impossible, it's that programming is hard enough and it makes it much harder to be sure the code is correct. Or maybe put another way "not difficult" for Knuth and for the typical working programmer (or me) aren't identical.

Thanks for sharing that paper! As an aside, it's really remarkable just how readable the state of the art papers such as the one you shared there from that era are. Either computing science has greatly advanced to the point where clarity is no longer achievable without years of specialized preparatory study or the quality of writing has regressed.

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