what a charming time it was when that generation discovered a bunch of stuff that now undergirds daily life:
“
Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.
“
random sample of a trip note in which he is in ited to consult on a project that he thinks ought to be killed:
> ... cannot be expected from the average programmer
Ha! He had to deal with the political B.S. of well-spoken self-important people who spend excessively long and write excessively long code/proofs getting accolades over those that just get things done in the best way! I feel for him!
Nonetheless, Prof. Baurer was not a loser. According to some sources he contributed to the invention of the notion of "stack" and "software engineering" among other things.
what a charming time it was when that generation discovered a bunch of stuff that now undergirds daily life:
“ Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands. “
random sample of a trip note in which he is in ited to consult on a project that he thinks ought to be killed:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd06xx/EWD601.PDF
> ... cannot be expected from the average programmer
Ha! He had to deal with the political B.S. of well-spoken self-important people who spend excessively long and write excessively long code/proofs getting accolades over those that just get things done in the best way! I feel for him!
Nonetheless, Prof. Baurer was not a loser. According to some sources he contributed to the invention of the notion of "stack" and "software engineering" among other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_L._Bauer
Digistra’s writing, trip report to Munich, a mechanical repair where a three-fold deduction takes place between 26-27 Nov. 1976.
The prose strikes one in the vein of a 20th century existential writer.
My favourite is EWD1303: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150FP/archive/edsger-dijkstra/...
It is Dijkstra's recounting of Operating System design with the notion of the first concurrent computer and interrupt.
Many of these EWD notes are hand written with a lot of mathematical notation, and no corrections. For example:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.PDF
I am reminded of Salieri's reaction to Mozart's manuscripts in the movie Amadeus.
In this thesis, we restrict ourselves to a tape reader (150 characters per second) and a tape punch (25 characters per second).
Dijkstra’s I/O apparatus corresponds to communication mechanisms for tape reading.
Dijkstra's notions about provable functions are probably more important during these times where LLMs are churning out hallucinated code.