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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)

#201

Post by mayoff »

photonthug wrote: post #11
psychoslave wrote: post #7

Ok, the first thought reading the title was "ah, surely this is about Dijkstras." The immediate second thought that came was the famous quote “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”, from Alan Kay should I believe https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/69528-i-don-t-know-how-many...

Hmm, time will tell on this rivalry. OOP may not be as harmful as GOTO, but it does seem to be falling out of favor. Dijkstras point of view may be as vindicated with one as with the other.

Michael Snoyman has a great talk about this, “FP is the new OOP”. He argues that some major concepts that OOP popularized are now mainstream and accepted, and OOP-bashing ignores those concepts and just acts like OOP only means the bad parts.

https://youtu.be/to8ISIQjETk

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

#202

Post by cangeroo »

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.

Whereas "AndrewKemendo" provided first-hand testimony, which added value in the form of a datapoint, I struggle to see how your opinion of his testimony added any value, other than negativity.

It's fine to dislike something - and just move on.

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

#203

Post by Hayatabad »

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.

+1.

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

#204

Post by deanCommie »

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.

Twisol's point that you failed to find is that you could choose to give AndrewKemendo the benefit of the doubt.

Clearly there is something novel about the way Dijistra thought and worked. Most of us don't do things that way - formulate our thinking, then work towards one perfect first draft.

AndrewKemendo saw that and said "I identify, I'm the same way", and tried to describe what his way of thinking sounds like.

If to you it sounds like the exact way of thinking and problem solving as yours or mine, well, then perhaps AndrewKemendo did not describe it well enough. Perhaps it's impossible to describe it to someone else. But the necessary context to his description is that his brain works different from yours or mine. So the short textual description also means something different than what it does for you and me.

Is there the possibility that AndrewKemendo is self-grandiose and not aware that he is not special and his verbose descriptions of his unique way of thinking are nothing but? Sure. But even if we had no other evidence that this is not the case, it would cost you nothing to be curious and assume best intention. But we do have other evidence - and it's in the first line - "There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain."

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

#205

Post by deanCommie »

bluGill wrote: post #86
hardasspunk wrote: post #54

Earlier 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 don't know why people are arguing with you. Clearly the question here is whether you think, then type, or type while you think.

I can type at >100 WPM (just tested). I recently had to write a 3-page document for work, the summary of weeks of research and interviewing. It wound up 1959 words (just checked). I wrote it over the course of one 8 hour day, after having procrastinated on it for the previous 2 days.

I came home at the end of that day exhausted because I felt like I finally did weeks of work in one day.

But, this 8 hour day had 2 hours of meetings and 1 hour for lunch. Say another 1 hour for random slacking. So pure concentrated writing was 4 hours or 240 minutes, which winds up to about 8 words per minute. That's it!

And I would consider this fairly fast, and again I'm not including the 2 days where I tried to write the doc at various times but failed to get started. SOMETHING was spinning in my brain in the background getting the ideas clarity.

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

#206

Post by sanderjd »

nordsieck wrote: post #100
sanderjd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's due to having come across this quote long ago, but this idea is ingrained in my bones. Except I think people have often overly focused on "lines of code" as the unit for this metric, leading many to overrate terse code, even when it is very dense. But I'm not sure what wording would capture this idea succinctly enough to include it in a pithy quote.

There's a benefit to terseness. Go's naming conventions are superior to Java's. APL (and it's many cousins) is a bridge too far for me, but I can see the appeal to having the entire program on a single screen.

Agree to (not entirely, but largely) disagree!

It's funny that you used Go as an example. Like 60% of its raison d'être is noticing that more lines of code is often better if each line is simple. And I think it's mostly right about that. Its inscrutable naming conventions are, on the other hand, a poor choice. (Notwithstanding that java's are a poor choice in the opposite direction.)

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

#207

Post by tialaramex »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #190
tialaramex wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Dijkstra's letter is about the "go-to statement" a then common but now very rare language feature which is akin to the machine code absolute jump - whatever you were doing, now you're doing this with no context. BASICs are perhaps the language HN readers are most likely to have seen which (in some cases) have the GOTO feature Dijkstra wrote the letter about, if you've seen goto in C for example, or C++, tha…

C/C++ has the dangerous goto under the guise of longjmp().

Although longjmp is more dangerous than C's goto, it's not that close to what Dijkstra was warning about. A longjmp is only allowed to move execution back to somewhere it was previously, and in the process all the appropriate book keeping is done, it can't send you somewhere you've never been or evade initialization/ destruction (at least any more so than these languages manage by themselves).

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

#208

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Denzel wrote: post #173
vacuity wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I try to do something like this, but way simpler and my productivity is low right now. Maybe more practice will help. Would you say you're usually good at doing this and getting results?

The Minto Pyramid Principle (MPP) offers an analogous, perhaps more accessible, process to problem solving similar to Andrew’s description. You use a problem solving process built on structured analysis by first defining the problem in terms of an Undesired Result (R1), Desired Result (R2) — the S and S’ in Andrew’s process. Then, you determine the Starting Point in terms of the logical structures that generate your…

Thanks for this. Very interesting indeed

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

#209

Post by zubairq »

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…

I agree with this comment. My typing speed was sometimes the bottleneck, but usually it was my speed of thought, but often I fell into this cargo cult thinking that the ability to type fast matters

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

#210

Post by j7ake »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110
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…

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…

Why are you using a Markov process though to model time-dependent likelihood pathways ?

Doesn’t make sense. Your next step depends on much more than just knowing where you are at S. One needs to account for the history of where you were before.

Or maybe you’re just using technical words with precise meanings to describe a vague imprecise heuristic?

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