koldfront

Dijkstra on stage #programming

🕒︎ - 2022-06-21

If you ever looked a graphs (in computer science) you've come across the name Dijkstra. He is also known for a paper that became sort of a proto-meme: "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", and a number of other papers and pithy quotes, like this:

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

and:

"I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge 'How not to make a mess of it,' has not been met."

Watching this video: A Programmer’s Early Memories by Edsger W. Dijkstra from The International Research Conference in the History of Computing at Los Alamos, 1976 make my toes curl - the contrast to e.g. Donald Knuth's or Konrad Zuze's stage presence is striking.

Add comment

How to comment, in excruciating detail…

To avoid spam many websites make you fill out a CAPTCHA, or log in via an account at a corporation such as Twitter, Facebook, Google or even Microsoft GitHub.

I have chosen to use a more old school method of spam prevention.

To post a comment here, you need to:

  • Configure a newsreader¹ to connect to the server koldfront.dk on port 1119 using nntps (nntp over TLS).
  • Open the newsgroup called lantern.koldfront and post a follow up to the article.
¹ Such as Thunderbird, Pan, slrn, tin or Gnus (part of Emacs).

Or, you can fill in this form:

+=