Slashdot Log In
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: 1930-2002
Posted by
michael
on Wed Aug 07, 2002 06:51 PM
from the goto-end dept.
from the goto-end dept.
Order writes "Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the famous "Go To Considered Harmful", has died on Aug. 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: 1930-2002
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 409 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
|
2
(1)
|
2
"We're not worthy!"... (Score:3, Interesting)
After reading this article, I think we all need to pause for a minute, and consider the insight of this simple observation.
Add his definition of things human minds are geared to list: static relationships. It's perfectly in line with Dawkins statement that human minds are designed to comprehend things roughly human-sized moving at roughly human-speeds.
I keep forgetting how long people have been programming. Think about how many people using GOTO there were back in 1968. Probably only a few thousand. Crazy.
Re:Final GOTO (Score:5, Funny)
EWD Archives (Score:5, Informative)
A pity he's gone.
Respects (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Respects (Score:4, Funny)
What a thoughtful post! Dictionary.com's pathfinding algorithms were able to find out what you mean by 'respest'. Heh.
More articles (Score:5, Informative)
Some links from my article that slashdot rejected some hours ago: the University of Texas announcement [utexas.edu] has a list of his awards and discoveries. (He taught at UT.) A brief paper [utexas.edu] (in PDF, it's scanned from a handwritten paper for CACM if I recall) shows his brilliant, clear, and concise methods of thought and writing.
If you ever used an application that made use of shortest-path searching -- say, any real-time strategy game -- then you owe this man a debt of gratitude.
Another great quote (Score:5, Insightful)
"Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes."
Some quotes of Edsger Dijkstra (Score:5, Informative)
Some Quotes of Edsger Dijkstra
"Always design your programs as a member of a whole family of programs, including those that are likely to succeed it"
"Separate Concerns"
"A Programming Language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits"
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" (from 1972 Turing Award Lecture)
"Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code"
"Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence"
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
And then my quote
Re:Some quotes of Edsger Dijkstra (Score:5, Funny)
Was he still talking about programming here?
Re:Some quotes of Edsger Dijkstra (Score:4, Informative)
So does that mean... (Score:3, Funny)
seriously though, i think dijkstra will be remembered as long as there is the need to prevent race conditions... which in my eyes is quite an accomplishment.
-strangeloop
He did so much more... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He did so much more... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason that the bulk of the comments here revolve around the whole GOTO thing is because, quite frankly, that is the only one of Diijkstra's contributions that the bulk of Slashdotters are capable of understanding and appreciating.
Most of these posts are quite equivalent to, upon hearing of the passing of Ghandi, saying "Gee, I heard that guy could go a few days without food".
But, to paraphrase the great man himself: in Computer Science most folks miss the science for the telescope. Some things never change.
Rest in peace Professor Diijkstra.
Sad to see him go (Score:5, Insightful)
In today's computer world, dominated more by marketing folks more than the technicians, I wonder how many people have heard of this man. It is sad that in the last decade of so, CEOs like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have gained so much public recognition while people Dijkstra languish in relative anonymity.
A few weeks ago, there was a post in /. about Knuth. I was surprised to see many ask who he was!
Re: True metal survives the acid test of time. (Score:4, Insightful)
and in his time, whom do you think was more famous, Newton or his King/Queen ? Lagrange or whatever Louie ruled then ?
True metal survives the acid test of time. The ornamentations, the hype-sellers, the gates'es and Bezos'es, will be forgotten by everyone (except historians) by the next century.
Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm and other works will be remembered in centuries to come.
Commentary on our profession (Score:5, Insightful)
We're getting in on the ground floor. The folks who were there in the VERY BEGINNING of our field are still around to teach us something. We need to remember just how privileged we are to have these fantastic people with us to "pass the torch" so to speak.
Look at how far the medical field has come in its history. Or chemistry. Or physics. And these are just scientific professions.
Think about other things, like teaching or agriculture.
We're the next group to advance CS/E. We've got to adopt these folks as our mentors and learn all we can from them.
Not just _how_ their stuff works, but _why_ they did it. Fundamental practices 30 years ago are as fundamental today as they were then.
"Those who fail to learn from their past tend to repeat it."
RIP, Mr. Dijkstra. And thanks for being such a great mentor.
--NBVB
I like Spaghetti Code (Score:3, Funny)
I read books I picked up from the library for free which showed Basic programs threaded back and forth in sequence, for no apparent reason, and like this sentence, confusing the heck out of me. I saw it as a challenge. I also loved condition gotos'. They were evil.
Gosub? Bah. They ran out of memory too much. Because I hadn't the discipline to Return before I Goto'd out of the subroutine. So I used Goto's to simulate procedures. I also eventually used Goto's in a way that I would eventually learn is like structured programming. Set some variables, goto here, do stuff, goto back, set the same variables something else, goto here, do stuff, maybe goto back. Or it would be the end of the program.
Then I got my first C book. I still haven't got the hang of this language. Before the book even mentions "goto" it gives me a lecture on how awful goto's are and that they can produce spaghetti code. But I *like* spaghetti code. And whats with these labels? Line numbers were so much cooler. But I took the man's advice, I used functions.
But Basic spoiled me. I was never an effective programmer since. It wasn't long after I learned of structured programming that I got my first book on C++ and was introduced to object-oriented programming. Now, for someone using structured techniques for a couple years, the need for objects seemed to make sense. But I was lost in a sea of hierarchial classes and virtual methods.
When I first went on the internet, I started learning all kinds of crazy languages, hoping some of them would be simpler. And there were many. Except for forth and common lisp. Except for ML and Smalltalk. So I am still toying with scheme as I speak, still trying to figure out what exactly the difference between a recursive and iterative process is.
Eventually, I'll figure out how to write spaghetti code in this otherwise clean and elegant language too. Continuations sound promising, from what it sounds like.
I wish the best of Dijkstra--hope he rests in peace. Honestly, I've never heard of him until this post to slashdot.
But maybe it is slightly better for him not to know that some of us never learn.
Re:I like Spaghetti Code (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, Taco. Post under your own name.
Quotes (Score:5, Funny)
re:guards (Score:3, Interesting)
drop this /. thread and read Dijkstra's work (Score:5, Interesting)
Just looking at his U texas [utexas.edu]publication list is an awesome (pre-1990s meaning) experience. Let your eyes scan it, as they would the Grand Canyon. Then wander around the UTexas site, where many publications are online, and start reading. You'll be a better person for it. And you may experience a thrill of understanding, when you see that his hands hold up so much of today's code, as Shakespeare's hands hold up so much of the language and common experience of the English world.
To get a feel for the span of his life's work, consider his thesis title, "Communications with an automatic computer." The word "automatic" was necessary then, to distinguish it from a person with a calculator. The machine he used in his thesis? It had a 32K memory unit. He divided this into what he called "living" and "dead" memory.
Let's hope that his memory will be of the living variety.
To a man I never shall meet, thank you.
God Bless Dijkstra (Score:5, Insightful)
This man contributed many great ideas to our field. The sad thing is how many programmers are still in ignorance of them, even now. You did great things, Mr. Dijkstra, and will be sorely missed. I just hope we're still allowed to have generic computing devices in ten years' time, so we can continue to refine and develop the revolutionary ideas you left us with.
Dijstra's papers from the mid 1970's. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've kept a whole boxful of his papers over the years - just because they are so fascinating to browse.
He invented his own programming language for expressing algorithms - but doesn't seem ever to have written a compiler for it. He refers to algorithms his mother came up with...almost every document has something interesting like that.
The notes are written in the most perfect handwriting you've ever seen.
They could have been printed - they are that precise. Then, one of them out of the blue seems to have been written in someone else's handwriting - it's just as amazingly neat though and when you get to the end of it, it says something like: Apologies for the poor handwriting in this note, but my left hand could use some practice.
These cannot be stored as text files without losing most of their historical interest. Maybe I should spend an evening or two to scan them and put them online. There could be no more fitting tribute to the man.
They're scanned and webbed already (Score:4, Informative)
EWD - Algol, the stack model and recursion (Score:3, Funny)
goto, his development of the stack model was an
evolutionary leap in the development of computers.
Every computer made today embodies his model.
Interrupt handling, recursion, reentrant
programming, multi-programming, multi-processing,
virtual memory all come out of Edsger's model.
I had the great fortune to work on a Burroughs B5500
and later the first B6500 that made it out of
manufacturing. This entire series of computers
was based on Edsger's model and his Algol 60 compiler.
Tony Hoare may have put it best when he quipped
"Algol is an improvement over all its successors".
Certainly Edsger was an improvement over most of
his successors.
Jim Tarvid
A great loss... (Score:4, Insightful)
Moderators: This is one of those posts where I say screw karma. Mod me to redundant hell if you wish, it just doesn't matter.
This is an extremely sad day for computer science. There is hardly a field in CS that Dijkstra's work didn't touch. His work can be seen everywhere we use computers.
Personally, this is an extremely sad day for me as well. Although I never met the man or saw him speak (now one of my greatest regrets), being in college, he's my equivalent of a Joe DiMaggio or a Ted Williams. This man was a hero and an inspiration to me.
Sometimes it really pisses me off that we show such public sorrow for sports figures who pass away like Ted Williams who for the most part didn't do a damn thing to really and truly improve our lives (granted Ted Williams was a marine and fighter pilot but that's not why most people were mourning him). This man greatly and directly contributed to a vast improvement of our quality of life as human beings. His obituary will be a foot note and page Z-42 of the NY Times and Washington Post but when celebrities die, they're front and center on page 1. It makes me sick.
That's my 2 cents and I'm not giving any damn change. >:o
goto alternative: comefrom (Score:3, Funny)
comefrom.
Linux Kernel (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who actually read the linux kernel source codem probably already knew Dijkstra and his god-like powers in the computer-sciences.
But for those who put their nose in there and juts read the comments, there are some references
Fr example: drivers/scsi/NCR5380.c
So long, and thanks for all .. (Score:4, Interesting)
This software engineering class was very pragmatic, emphasizing methodical design, implentation, and testing. As I recall, Dr. Dijkstra gave his lecture near the end of our semester, by which time we had been heavily involved in something resembling a team development evironment for a few months.. There was a very corporate feeling to our regimen of meetings and reports.
So one day we all go to the faculty lounge to hear the esteemed professor speak. He comes in the door of the lounge appearing to me most unlike the kind of man who could write so forcefully about programming, dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt with a distinctly old-grandfather look on his face.
In his very soft-spoken manner, he told us that he beleived that the main problem with programmers was a lack of rigor. People were so concerned with coding and testing that they never learned how to write something correctly the first time. He asked us to prove the correctness of the code for a binary search and spent the next half-hour proceeding glumly as we slowly worked through the process with him.
I got the impression we were a vaguely dissapointing group of students who he could tell were not convinced of the validity of his approach. It wasn't even a bitter dissapointment, though. I felt as though he was someone who had totally convinced himself that he knew how to make the world a better place, but that noone was listening.
He answered our questions about "gotos considered harmful" (it was his editor's idea to give it the cute title) with what I considered obvious patience. He talked about how he really only was able to keep up on the research that people referred to him these days. And then the lecture was over.
Our professor and Dr. Dijkstra were good friends, and I hung around after class talking with them about computer science and Dijksta's past. I ended up in his office after a while and we chatted about the current state of the industry as he saw it, why he really liked Texas, and so on. He was so intelligent in his conversation--asked so many probling questions--that by the time I was done I felt both touched and exhausted. He put on his cowboy hat and walked out of the office with me and headed off to his next appointment.
That was the last time I saw Esdgar Dijkstra--the only real time I ever talked to him. But I feel that the world has lost a quiet crusader, and I feel a tug in my heart thinking about this old dean of computer science with his cowboy hat.
Even more Dijkstra quotes (Score:3, Informative)
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
COBOL is for morons.
With respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.