51–60 of 129 posts
This is a treasure (it’s been around quite a while). For those youngers out there: still completely relevant. Still ahead of the game, imho.
I've read them all. While they are fun to read as their commentary come from a place of logic, there is a lot of emotion baked in and little room for being open minded about potential alternatives that could find their ways to reality. Dijkstra was very smart but you can tell thinking is a little closed, which is not objectively bad, but it happens a little too much for my taste.
Some famous Dijkstra quotes: “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”
As a UC Santa Cruz masters alum, my favorite Dijkstra quotes come from notes from his visit to UCSC in the 1970s (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EWD714...):
“I found the UCSC campus not an inspiring place, and the longer I stayed there, the more depressing it became. The place seemed most successful in hiding all the usual symptoms of a seat of learning. In the four-person apartment we occupied, only one of the four desks had a reading lamp, and the chairs in front of the desks were so low that writing at the desks was not comfortable. Probably it doesn't matter. Can UCSC students write? Do they need to? The notice boards showed ads from typing services "Grammar and spelling corrected.". (One of these ads itself contained a spelling error!)”
I once had one of his quote on the back of my business card when I was doing a lot of software dev consultancy: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". I keep meaning to sit down with this site and make my way through it all. Might make more progress if I grab them into an eReader-friendly format and then peruse them more easily when travelling.
Something which I occasionally link to, is this: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF >. It not only shows why computer languages should start their indexes at 0 (instead of 1), but also shows why intervals should be specified as lower-inclusive and upper-exclusive.
I think a compelling argument can be made that 0-based is better for offsets and 1-based is better for indexes, and that we should not think of both as the same thing. https://hisham.hm/2021/01/18/again-on-0-based-vs-1-based-ind...
I once had one of his quote on the back of my business card when I was doing a lot of software dev consultancy: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". I keep meaning to sit down with this site and make my way through it all. Might make more progress if I grab them into an eReader-friendly format and then peruse them more easily when travelling.
Astronomy is not named "Telescope Science" though. ;-)
Dijkstra already wrote this in the 80s and today many teachers still complain about this fact. I also know that, at least in the Netherlands, the curriculum is judged based on the percentage of students that pass. If too few students pass, then the material is made easier (never harder!), so you can imagine what happens if this process continued for half a century by now.
I really enjoyed the this one: Some meditations on Advanced Programming https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD00xx/EWD32.... As I'm currently in a Functional Programming course in Haskell... This resonated. I know that we'll always need to write programs which directly interface with memory. However, when we don't need to do that... Maybe we shouldn't write programs in this style (i.e. imperative). Maybe w…
Alas, I live an a world where efficiency does actually matter, and elegance to me includes efficiency. I live in a world of embedded software, portability, and reliability. In this regard, almost every single functional language is an utter failure, because they require runtimes and big fat common libraries. Even golang is borderline. Haskell has little chance. Generally I think this does answer the question about wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"here" is definitely not a zeroth block. As soon you start walking, you are in the first block. However, if you are numbering the separations (cuts) between the blocks, you can number that "here" as zero.
Ok as soon as you start walking your are in the first block, I agree. So then where are you before that? What block were you at before you started moving, when you were giving directions? What is the name of the block from which you left to enter the first block? Before you started walking I mean. And mustn’t that block be before that other first? When we move from where we start we count up, so then mustn’t an earli…
Think of jogging on a road. When you are at the beginning of the road, you are at the start of the first mile, not in the zeroth mile. It doesn't have one more mile prior to first mile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what is there to gain with this distinction? Just the convenience of having an ordinal number to say? Rather than saying "chapter 0, chapter 1, chapter 2" one can say "the fourth chapter"? Or is it the fact that the chapter with number 4 has 3 chapters preceding it? On first glance I find this all rather meaningless pedantry.
If I use ordinal numbers to count, then counting tells me the number of objects. Sometimes I want to know the number of objects. EDIT: Yeah, I don't know why book chapter labels shouldn't start with "0". It seems fine to me. They could use letters instead of numbers for all I care.
but as far as meaningful technical contributions, i struggle to find anything. his path search algorithm, no offence, is self-evident.
for all the disdain he appears to have had for (what we now call) the 'move fast and break things' style of engineering/science, they were the ones that gave us everything today. you innovate by running experiments, not philosophising and writing proofs.
in retrospect he probably should have stayed on his initial discipline, theoretical physics.