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Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

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Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#121

Post by Judgmentality »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #92
rramadass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sure do. Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... ); Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their…

My friend once said: - B.S. = bull shit - M.S. = more shit - PhD = piled higher & deeper

And HBS is 2/3 BS.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#122

Post by [deleted] »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #92
rramadass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sure do. Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... ); Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their…

My friend once said: - B.S. = bull shit - M.S. = more shit - PhD = piled higher & deeper

[deleted]

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#123

Post by assap_cocky »

thotsBgone wrote: post #110
jakespoon wrote: post #107

Backus literally inspired functional programming with his Turing acceptance and Dijkstra attacked him for it. Dijkstra attacked the paper that inspired Haskell and everything else that currently exists in FP. He tried to destroy it. He should be a footnote in history.

The Whine Law: There will always be someone in every Hacker News comment section to whine like a baby. Every topic, every thread. Someone will whine.

We both can't be right!

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#124

Post by HarryHirsch »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #89
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the difference between computer science and software engineering. And the vast majority of people who graduate with a CS degree are going to work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. They are therefore being mis-educated to the degree that their CS program agrees with Dijkstra's philosophy. (Which doesn't mean that Dijkstra is wrong about CS. It just means that a CS degree shouldn't be the passp…

Dijkstra is totally of the European tradition where if you don't belong to the guild it's flat out illegal for you to work in the field.

The European tradition is that if you are not admitted to the guild you must not work in the field without supervision. Nothing wrong with that, tbh. You get something out of it, too, your sponsor is invested in your success.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#125

Post by [deleted] »

microtherion wrote: post #113
mysterydip wrote: post #73

I wish seeing the name Dijkstra didn't immediately remind me of his oft-quoted BASIC comment: "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." The problem is it's quoted regardless of how much the BASIC dialect being discussed resembles the one he was talking about [1]. There…

In my opinion, The Proper Way To Teach Computer Science was the one area where Dijkstra made his most detrimental contribution, by promoting a particular school of instruction based on strong opinions with weak to no empirical underpinnings. In _Coders at Work_, Knuth offers a counter-argument that I find compelling: > Seibel: It seems a lot of the people I've talked to had direct access to a machine when they were s…

[deleted]

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#126

Post by 908B64B197 »

microtherion wrote: post #113
mysterydip wrote: post #73

I wish seeing the name Dijkstra didn't immediately remind me of his oft-quoted BASIC comment: "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." The problem is it's quoted regardless of how much the BASIC dialect being discussed resembles the one he was talking about [1]. There…

In my opinion, The Proper Way To Teach Computer Science was the one area where Dijkstra made his most detrimental contribution, by promoting a particular school of instruction based on strong opinions with weak to no empirical underpinnings. In _Coders at Work_, Knuth offers a counter-argument that I find compelling: > Seibel: It seems a lot of the people I've talked to had direct access to a machine when they were s…

Knuth also starts his book by defining his own assembly language and computer architecture.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#127

Post by Jtsummers »

jakespoon wrote: post #116
Jtsummers wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming already existed in a few forms by the 1977 Turing Award lecture. ML was around since 1973, which defined the ML family (Ocaml, SML, F#) and influenced Haskell and others. The Lisp family of languages had been around since 1958. Some parts of the lecture can be seen as related to languages in the APL family (originated in 1965). These developments influenced the lecture itself. To gain context i…

So, looking back from 2020, did Backus oversell it? We aren't there yet but it still looks like the right direction to me.

I will agree, Backus' ideas have panned out in many ways. Not having read his lecture in quite a while I can't comment on whether or not, in 1977, he was overselling the idea at the time, especially as I'm not familiar with the state of the art in research at the time (having been born 5 years later, and CS concepts not being taught in chronological order).

Regardless, your original comment made two absurd claims:

1. Dijkstra attacked the paper that inspired Haskell and everything else that currently exists in FP. He tried to destroy it. [emphasis added]

Which is what my quote of Dijkstra's actual statements was meant to rebut. He did not try to destroy it. He criticized it, and some of his criticism may have been wrong then, and I'd say is wrong now (with greater understanding of the ideas Backus was presenting), but he did not try to destroy it.

2. He should be a footnote in history.

Another absurd position. Because of one response (and if you wanted to you can probably find a number of others) exaggerated beyond reason ("He tried to destroy it."), you want to dismiss some 50 years of work.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#128

Post by Jtsummers »

908B64B197 wrote: post #126
microtherion wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, The Proper Way To Teach Computer Science was the one area where Dijkstra made his most detrimental contribution, by promoting a particular school of instruction based on strong opinions with weak to no empirical underpinnings. In _Coders at Work_, Knuth offers a counter-argument that I find compelling: > Seibel: It seems a lot of the people I've talked to had direct access to a machine when they were s…

Knuth also starts his book by defining his own assembly language and computer architecture.

Because at the time he wrote it there wasn't a good standard or sufficiently common one that had the properties he wanted to use for exploring algorithms. See MMIX for something closer to a modern architecture than the original MIX.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#129

Post by 908B64B197 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #81
mschaef wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches. Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there, but that wasn't really what his research was about. He wrote longhand (scans here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ ) and didn't really use much technology directly in his work. This…

This is the difference between computer science and software engineering. And the vast majority of people who graduate with a CS degree are going to work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. They are therefore being mis-educated to the degree that their CS program agrees with Dijkstra's philosophy. (Which doesn't mean that Dijkstra is wrong about CS. It just means that a CS degree shouldn't be the passp…

What's more confusing is that Software Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer science overlap quite a bit, but are distinct fields.

Furthermore, there really is two kinds of CS departments: the ones that were spun out of a Math department and those that emerged out of an Electrical Engineering one.

Re: Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

#130

Post by rightbyte »

jakespoon wrote: post #116
Jtsummers wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming already existed in a few forms by the 1977 Turing Award lecture. ML was around since 1973, which defined the ML family (Ocaml, SML, F#) and influenced Haskell and others. The Lisp family of languages had been around since 1958. Some parts of the lecture can be seen as related to languages in the APL family (originated in 1965). These developments influenced the lecture itself. To gain context i…

So, looking back from 2020, did Backus oversell it? We aren't there yet but it still looks like the right direction to me.

His hopes for functional programming machines seems like overselling his dream of abandoning von Neumann atleast. Arcane Lisp-machines was actually made as a comparison. I don't get the feeling Backus meant that a "FP system" should be an abstraction ontop of a von Neumann machine/language.
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