[HN Gopher] E.W.Dijkstra Archive
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       E.W.Dijkstra Archive
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 96 points
       Date   : 2025-12-21 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cs.utexas.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.utexas.edu)
        
       | coderatlarge wrote:
       | 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
        
         | fghiop wrote:
         | > ... 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!
        
         | throwaway0xTA wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | kensai wrote:
         | 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
        
       | throwaway0xTA wrote:
       | _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.
        
       | jonjacky wrote:
       | 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_.
        
       | Ologn wrote:
       | Dijkstra's notions about provable functions are probably more
       | important during these times where LLMs are churning out
       | hallucinated code.
        
       | commandersaki wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-21 23:00 UTC)