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:
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.
> ... 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!
Good read. Completely off topic: He traveled by sleeper train and mentioned that he slept reasonably well and very well on the return trip. In the beginning of my career I made nearly the opposite trip to Brussels by sleeper to a completely useless lobbying/networking event with little tangible content. Often sleep in sleepers is not very good. But on the return trip I only wake up when the train had already stopped at my destination and had to get off very hastily.
Not only CS was more fun without AI slop, but traveling, too ;)
I met the man a few times (friend of my father) and I was programming when already when I did: both my father and him always told me to not just write code, but proofs first. I am rather happy for him he is not alive with this LLM stuff. He would've considered it the worst thing ever.
There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
Oh sure, he might have made several, or many, drafts on scratch paper. But even then it is impressive. Many of these are around 12 pages of hand written text and math in ink with no corrections -- he famously used a Mont Blanc fountain pen. How many people could do that at all, even if they were copying from a rough draft? And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!
Well he only needs to write one mistake-free page at a time. On page two, a mistake, you just stat page two over again.
But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken.
(For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.)
Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.
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
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
> ... 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!
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.
Good read. Completely off topic: He traveled by sleeper train and mentioned that he slept reasonably well and very well on the return trip. In the beginning of my career I made nearly the opposite trip to Brussels by sleeper to a completely useless lobbying/networking event with little tangible content. Often sleep in sleepers is not very good. But on the return trip I only wake up when the train had already stopped at my destination and had to get off very hastily. Not only CS was more fun without AI slop, but traveling, too ;)
I met the man a few times (friend of my father) and I was programming when already when I did: both my father and him always told me to not just write code, but proofs first. I am rather happy for him he is not alive with this LLM stuff. He would've considered it the worst thing ever.
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.
> and no corrections
There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
Oh sure, he might have made several, or many, drafts on scratch paper. But even then it is impressive. Many of these are around 12 pages of hand written text and math in ink with no corrections -- he famously used a Mont Blanc fountain pen. How many people could do that at all, even if they were copying from a rough draft? And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!
Well he only needs to write one mistake-free page at a time. On page two, a mistake, you just stat page two over again.
But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken.
(For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.)
Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.
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.
Do you mean something specific or his general approach to program correctness i.e. guarded commands, weakest precondition calculus etc. ?