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Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

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Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#31

Post by alex_muscar »

Bromskloss wrote: post #10
weinzierl wrote: post #2

This is a series of cell phone shots of an exchange of letters between Backus and Dijkstra. There is no transcript and some of the letters are hard to read, especially the handwritten ones. I only skimmed it but it is definitely an interesting read. I didn't interpret their stance as arrogant though. In my book both are enthusiastic about their subject and think the other party is misguided. Both take some effort not…

What do you say? Shall we divide the task among a few of us and type this up? (Or do people perhaps do this with OCR nowadays?) Would there be enough interest in having these letters in searchable form to motivate the effort?

> Would there be enough interest in having these letters in searchable form to motivate the effort?

Yes, please :). Esp. Dijkstra's letter from the 5th of Apr '79. It's a bit hard to read.

Thanks for making them available.

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#32

Post by jorams »

weinzierl wrote: post #5
acidflask wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title "This guy’s arrogance takes your breath away" is taken directly from Backus's own description of this collection of letters. I've changed the title to make clearer that it is a direct quotation. Unfortunately, the Library of Congress does not allow scanners without prior approval, so this was the only way I could make my own copies. It did not help that all these letters were written or typed on very thin m…

Thanks for making these letter public! I missed that the quote was Backus's, it makes a lot more sense now. The quality of your photos is excellent and I doubt a scanner would make them much better. I wish there was a transcript though. As a start, here is the first letter transcribed: to John Backus International Business Machines Corporation 5600 Cattle Road SAN JOSE CA 95193 U.S.A Monday 29th of May, 1978 “To inte…

As an addition to your transcription, here is the last letter transcribed:

    to John Backus
    91 Saint Germain Avenue
    SAN FRANCISCO, California 94114
    U.S.A.
                          12th July 1979
    
    Dear John,
       My schedule is very tight, and I am afraid that I
    must disappoint John Williams; Monday 20 or Tuesday 21
    August seem the only two slots that are really available.
      I shall arrive in the USA on Sunday 29th July, and
    had already committed myself for the week of Monday
    30 July to Burroughs in Mission Viejo. My wife and
    the two youngest children will join me for the first
    three weeks of the trip, and the week of 6th August
    was planned as "the real holiday." Since then Bill
    McKeenan has twisted my arm: the programming
    course to be given that week was so heavily over-
    booked that he asked me to give a second course,
    in parallel to David's. Under those circumstances
    I would like to avoid further commitments in
    the week starting on Monday 13: it is their last
    week in the USA, and I have then been working
    almost all the time!
      Immediately after WG2.3 I shall go to Austin,
    Texas (Burroughs and University), and then home!
    If I have a completely free choice, I think I
    would prefer Monday 20 slightly over Tuesday 21.
    
    New title and abstract:
    
    Title: Termination Detection for Diffusing Computations
    
    Abstract: The activity of a finite computation may
    propagate over a network of machines, when machines
    may delegate (repeatedly) subtasks to their
    neighbours; when such a computation is fired
    from a single machine, we call it "a diffusing
    computation." We present a signalling scheme
    --to be superimposed on the diffusing computation--
    enabling the machine that fired it to detect its
    termination. Our signalling scheme is perfectly
    general in the sense that, independently of the
    topology of the network, it is applicable to
    any diffusing computation. (End of abstract.)
    
      Please give my regards to John Williams and tell
    him how sorry I am that I shall miss him. I
    am not familiar with distance and transport facilities
    between Santa Cruz and San Jose. If it is better
    when I come to San Jose the day before that
    is fine with me; may I leave the logistics to
    you? (Wife and children leave on Friday 17th of August.)
    With my greetings and best wishes,
                     yours ever
                          _Edsger_

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#33

Post by c3534l »

bmer wrote: post #19
vanderZwan wrote: post #15

You know, I'm wondering: could part of Dijkstra's reputed arrogance be due to a cultural difference? I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; it's almost the opposite: not calling someone out on their flaws implies we either consider them a lost cause or not worth the hassle of educating. I almost got fired from a teaching position in Sweden because I to…

Full disclosure: a) Dijkstra is a bit of a personal "hero" of mine (hero in quotation marks, because I don't like to think of myself as a hero worshipper), because it was due to him I learned of textbooks written by guys like Eric Hehner and Roland Backhouse, which ended up changing my life significantly. b) I do not really grasp the technical issues being discussed in the correspondences between Dijkstra and Backus…

I personally found Backus to be way more of a dick in these letters, though I did gloss over some parts. It's strange how different people can get very different things from these letters. Maybe they just didn't have personalities that meshed well. I don't think it's cultural: I'm American and I find Dijkstra's demeanor to be perfectly acceptable, if a little a colorful. Although, in the same vein, people often don't like Linus Torvalds for many of the same reasons.

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#34

Post by EdwardCoffin »

Bromskloss wrote: post #10
weinzierl wrote: post #2

This is a series of cell phone shots of an exchange of letters between Backus and Dijkstra. There is no transcript and some of the letters are hard to read, especially the handwritten ones. I only skimmed it but it is definitely an interesting read. I didn't interpret their stance as arrogant though. In my book both are enthusiastic about their subject and think the other party is misguided. Both take some effort not…

What do you say? Shall we divide the task among a few of us and type this up? (Or do people perhaps do this with OCR nowadays?) Would there be enough interest in having these letters in searchable form to motivate the effort?

I'm willing to do at least one, but would like to have some assurance that I'm not working on the same letter as someone else before doing so. I'm more than willing to take on one of the handwritten ones, as I intend to just transcribe it with no effort at OCR anyway.

Edit: I'm going to just do Dijkstra to Backus, 1978–05–29 right now, update when done

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#35

Post by dang »

acidflask wrote: post #3
weinzierl wrote: post #2

This is a series of cell phone shots of an exchange of letters between Backus and Dijkstra. There is no transcript and some of the letters are hard to read, especially the handwritten ones. I only skimmed it but it is definitely an interesting read. I didn't interpret their stance as arrogant though. In my book both are enthusiastic about their subject and think the other party is misguided. Both take some effort not…

The title "This guy’s arrogance takes your breath away" is taken directly from Backus's own description of this collection of letters. I've changed the title to make clearer that it is a direct quotation. Unfortunately, the Library of Congress does not allow scanners without prior approval, so this was the only way I could make my own copies. It did not help that all these letters were written or typed on very thin m…

Thank you for going to the trouble of sharing this amazing material! I'd also like to hear about the historical paper you're working on.

We've taken the "arrogance" quote out of the HN title and replaced it with a neutral description of the letters—perhaps a bit too neutral, given how fabulous the post is. But HN readers can figure that out for themselves, especially once a post gets so high on the front page.

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#36

Post by bendbro »

dctoedt wrote: post #30
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea 'Truths as hard as fists', is one way I've seen it put in another language (sortof). > which could only have originated in California Flattery will get you anywhere. UTexas, in this case ...

> UTexas, in this case Got a reference for that? The Wikipedia discussion suggests otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Hi...

I think he's saying that by attacking California schools, the University of Texas was more likely to take Dijkstra in.

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#37

Post by vog »

Could anybody explain why this comment by "internaut" was downvoted so heavily?

I found internaut's comment to be insightful, well-conceived and on-topic. What's wrong with this comment?

EDIT: Moreover, who downvoted me so quickly for asking this question? This happened almost immediately after I posted this. Are there some nasty bots at place here?

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#38

Post by [deleted] »

eternalban wrote: post #23
vanderZwan wrote: post #15

You know, I'm wondering: could part of Dijkstra's reputed arrogance be due to a cultural difference? I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; it's almost the opposite: not calling someone out on their flaws implies we either consider them a lost cause or not worth the hassle of educating. I almost got fired from a teaching position in Sweden because I to…

> I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; quote: “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.” – Edsger Dijkstra Backus, on the other hand, is a genuinely lovely man. If you haven't read/seen his interview with CHM [1], then I urge you to do so. (Pay attention to his closing remarks!) [1]: htt…

[deleted]

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#39

Post by tluyben2 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #15

You know, I'm wondering: could part of Dijkstra's reputed arrogance be due to a cultural difference? I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; it's almost the opposite: not calling someone out on their flaws implies we either consider them a lost cause or not worth the hassle of educating. I almost got fired from a teaching position in Sweden because I to…

I am Dutch, my father studied under Dijkstra (TUE) and I studied under some of Dijkstra's prodigies. The humor Dijkstra uses is very Dutch to me and to me it's hilarious. His hard stabs were considered good practice in a lot of professional Dutch high end careers in the 70s/80s/90s but I believe it became less common. We have less issues telling like it is even if it hurts people in general, but when I still worked in NL this was definitely dying out.

That said; I admire Dijkstra for having such strong opinions and striving to create solid software no matter what. He was used to write software for machines that didn't exist yet[1] and I for one wish I had the time/budget to write software proofs. Especially with the modern tools (not the ones I learnt using from Dijkstra's works, but that was a good theoretical foundation which gave me understanding) we have now it's very possible but only for very expensive systems with very generous deadlines. I could say we will not deliver without that but I would be living under a bridge...

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/E...

Re: Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

#40

Post by Bromskloss »

eternalban wrote: post #23
vanderZwan wrote: post #15

You know, I'm wondering: could part of Dijkstra's reputed arrogance be due to a cultural difference? I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; it's almost the opposite: not calling someone out on their flaws implies we either consider them a lost cause or not worth the hassle of educating. I almost got fired from a teaching position in Sweden because I to…

> I'm Dutch, and bluntly calling out flaws in each other's work is not considered all that rude over here; quote: “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.” – Edsger Dijkstra Backus, on the other hand, is a genuinely lovely man. If you haven't read/seen his interview with CHM [1], then I urge you to do so. (Pay attention to his closing remarks!) [1]: htt…

Is the interview to be found on that page? I'm afraid I don't see it.
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