Talk:Edsger W. Dijkstra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects:

Contents

[edit] American dominated computer scientist

As is also the case with his disciple Niklaus Wirth, an American dominated computer scientist could never make sense of Dijsktra's concerns.

What does that mean? 84.182.124.154 (talk) 13:25, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Another confusing statement

His arrogance may have been clinical depression

What does that mean? How can arrogance "be" clinical depression? It needs to be re-worded. Oddity- (talk) 21:31, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Birth date

Is he born on May 30 or May 11? --Anon.

All other sources I have been able to find list his date of birth as May 11. Wikipedia seems to be the only source that lists his date of birth as May 30, so I have changed the article. --Popsracer 03:09, 22 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Why don't you ask him:)? Sources sources :) Xchmelmilos (talk) 16:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Most namedropped name in comp sci courses??

All my computer science professors who have met this guy at one point in time can't help but namedrop the fact that they've met him. Is this like this at most universities' computer science colleges? LOL, just something I happened to notice...

He was important; I mean, singlehandedly shifting the industry to use IF and WHILE statements, from GOTOs? Impressive. --Maru (talk) Contribs 04:59, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Streamlining" mathematical argument?

Dijkstra didn't want to "streamline" mathematical argument. If he had, he would have been involved in creating "software tools" to create mathematical arguments for the derivation of programs from mathematics. But his views on these tools are almost unprintable. No, Dijkstra wanted by example to show that it was possible to code programs as a human venture with a committment to truth "lexically ordered" above efficiency and "user friendliness" (assuming, the case of the latter word, he could even bring himself to use it). I've borrowed the notion of "lexical ordering" from the political philosopher John Rawls. In it, a political or other priority is fully satisfied before one proceeds to the next. It is 'lexical" because it is a sorting operation (when you sort alphabetically, the first letter is lexically prior to the second). Rawls' application to American Constitutional law meant that you had to first fully satisfy the requirements of the Constitution before moving on to other "priorities", where the bureaucratic term "priority" covers up lexical demands by giving everything the same "priority". Dijkstra, unlike most other computer scientists, had a strong sense of lexical ordering without, in all probability, reading Rawls because as an "intellectual" he removed himself from the category of a worker who would let management set the priorities, commanding him to "get it done and then worry about correctness", and fit in to a universal system of trade-offs where lexical ordering gives way to Pareto optimality. Dijsktra wanted not to streamline mathematical arguments but to continue to make them, strictly speaking outside of mathematics, which gave him during his lifetime a reputation as somewhat disruptive. When Communications of the ACM presented Dijsktra's thought on computer science education in 1992, the editors seemed to have taken care to defuse his dirsuptive reputation by embedding his thoughts in a context of early-Internet groupthink, and by setting him against computer science feminists (using feminism as a wedge issue as usual). In fact, he wanted to be a complete subject, a person who would step outside of a predefined role as an endowed professor in order to seek truth, as opposed to an object, a person responsive in a network to the "needs of others", this responsiveness being almost always a demand for compromise. To me, this shows how Kant seems to have been influential directly or indirectly in Dijkstra's mental development for in Holland in the 1940s, he seems, thanks to a traditional Continental education, to have been spared the more empirical and group-oriented education on tap in the the UK and America, where people learn the trade-offs they must make. I think this is why Dijkstra was in terms of the generally colorless character of so many computer scientists (who outside computer science and in a manner carefully separated from their professional concerns, engage wilder shores in the manner of Steve Jobs almost as a protest against dehumanization) such a Turk at a christening. Finally, many computer science professors like to say they met him because in meeting him they met a human being in what is (thanks in part to computers and their software, most assuredly not constructed the way Dijsktra thought they should be) a post-human era. To say as in Hollywood, I once met Tom Cruise, is a protest against the idea of being what is in Dilbert an inDUHvidual. I never met Dijsktra, but I did meet Kernighan and I was like Wayne's world: I'm not worthy! I'm scum! I think the article needs more depth on Dijkstra's contributions and in the near future I shall boldly go.

I rarely understand what you're talking about. --24.126.46.138 03:04, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

Perhaps we could get someone who speaks basic Dutch to resolve how his name is pronounced? Its changed three times since I first looked at this page about three months ago. Gershwinrb 06:48, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Been done--check this sound file at [1] of a Dutch man pronouncing Dijkstra's name and a few other names. That file comes from this page: [2]; there is actually a link to that page from Edsger Dijkstra. The problem is different English-speaking people hearing the sounds differently. Listening carefully, it sounded like "Ets-her Dextra" to me, a native speaker of American English. Or even "It's her Dextra". Listen and see what you think. DanielCristofani 10:14, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, it sounded like Eds-gur Dextra to me when I listened to it about a month ago, which was why I was surprised when it changed again. The problem is, I think, that the sound clip itself is open to interpretation for the first name. I'll try and see if I can't find a written phonetic pronunciation somewhere (or try and find a Dutch speaker on here!). Gershwinrb 11:24, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Notice that its even changed since you edited it. Gershwinrb 11:30, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Hi, sorry but I've never heard of the name and have no idea how it is pronounced. After listening to the file, it sounded like ETS-ger or ETS-gur. Don't know which to choose as a phonetic notation. The first part sounds like "ets" as in the Dutch verb "etsen"; the second part sounds like "gur" as in the final syllable of the Dutch word "water". For English speaking it's very hard to indicate the last part since they don't have the rough g sound. The closest (English) sound to the Dutch "g" is the rather rough "h" that is pronounced in words like "human" and "huge"; but not all "h" sound the same in English. So I'm afraid I don't know how to write Edsger so that it is pronounced correctly. If I were more experienced in using the International Phonetic Alphabet, maybe I could come up with a notation :S --A. Rad 16:51, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
How about deleting the Pronunciation section and instead adding a link to a sound file in the first line of the article? Then we can end this discussion once and for all. I could make the recording, if necessary. China Crisis 17:09, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
OK, The pronunciations of his first and last name in IPA are now right. His middle name however is wrong. Wybe is pronounced with "ie" like in "relief", so "Wiebe". Note the difference between y and ij. The only problem is, I don't know what the IPA symbol for that is. --NativeDutchSpeaker 11:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Its /i/, I changed it. China Crisis 07:33, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Clarification

Someone please clarify the sentence "In a 2001 interview, he stated a desire for "elegance," whereby the correct approach would be to process thoughts mentally, rather than attempt to render them until they are complete.". It is unclear to me what is meant by that statement.

[edit] Moved text

The snippets below were removed from The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science. They may be useful in expanding this article. -- Beland 01:20, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

  • his letter in March 1968 to CACM about structured programming
  • From “real life”, down to examples involving the coupling of railroad cars, Dijkstra throughout his career gave examples of how rigid formal constraints emerge from practical examples and as such presented a confusing picture.
  • Dijkstra, it seems from the record, thought in a way derived from his early training and education, a traditional education in The Netherlands which was meant to prepare an elite (similar to that in France) not for technical tasks but for legislation and governance. This type of training in the “ideal world” requires the statesman to think in a way described as “lexical” in that the statesman (again in an ideal world) satisfies Constitutional principles before other “priorities”, and the statesman doesn’t “do” trade–offs that sacrifice core principles.
Dijkstra took this world-view (which is based in part on Kant) into a technical career, and seems to have believed that program correctness was “constitutional” in that an incorrect program (or group solution) was worthless or even of negative worth.
His view seems to have been shared by earlier computer scientists: for example, in Gerald Weinberg’s 1972 book The Psychology of Computer Programming, Weinberg related a story in which a programmer, proposing an elegant but “inefficient” solution, tells the author of the inelegant, “efficient”, and buggy solution, “but your solution doesn’t work: if the solution doesn’t have to work, then Begin..End is a valid solution”.

[edit] Organization needed

We may need to split the big section about his life into "biography" and "works". --euyyn 21:05, 23 June 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Never owned a computer

I'm not sure if a I buy that. The closest thing to that I have found is this article http://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/ps/dijkstra.pdf which states that he did not write any of his articles on a computer.

A few sources, such as this interview indicate that he did not have much exposure to computers. Donald Knuth says "Edsgar Dijkstra wants proudly to be called a 'computer programmer,' although he hasn't touched a computer now for some years." here, in refercence to EWD340, or "The Humble Programmer." And EWD1305 also clearly shows this (answer to question 2).
--GatesPlusPlus 15:06, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Heh, you young'uns. Back in Dijkstra's heyday, let's say til at least the early 1980's, it was fairly rare for anyone, including CS professors and programmers who wrote code all day long, to personally own their own computers. It would be like an airline pilot owning his own 747. This was the pre-PC era and computers on which serious research or development was done, needed a lot of air conditioning, cost as much as a house, and were almost always owned by the university or company that the programer or researcher worked for. Yeah I know there were 8-bit micros in those days, but Dijkstra wasn't the kind of guy who would have used one. In the mid '80s there started to be affordable PC's and Macintoshes, but they were nowhere near as serious as the Unix workstations (that cost as much as cars) that a university CS dept. would have put on professors' desks, so Dijkstra would have used one of those instead. My guess is he resisted owning a computer til the 1990's or so when they became ubiquitous. 207.241.238.233 18:05, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Retirement

The short biography at Dijkstra's UTexas user page titled "About Dijkstra" suggests he retired as Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences in November 1999, but this WP article says he remained until his death in 2002. Does anybody know the correct date? -- Fhersey 21:46, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm a UT CS Alum and former student of Dijkstra. I think both of these dates are correct. After he 'retired' the university kept him as a member of the department (emeritus) until his death. -- Punkgeek 02:25, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Odd

Anyone ever notice how his last name just happens to have the common loop iterators i, j & k in that order? I wonder if he had an influence on choosing such loop iterators...

probable coincidence. The variable I was born out of being the first one-letter variable in Fortran that was implicitly declared integer, and J and K were the next ones. This was around 1953. (See Fortran and [3] for details). This was the source of the FORTRAN joke "God is REAL (unless declared INTEGER)"... --Alvestrand 10:52, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 09:48, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A page listing Dijkstra's algorithms

Hello,

I am just sounding out the idea of starting a page to list all of the algorithms invented by Dijsktra. Were there that many in the first place? Thanks. --Scriber (talk) 10:37, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Dijstra was prolific enough, but the problem is going through all the old papers and seeing what algorithms were new and what built on earlier work. Categories might make more sense - algorithms are inherently notable, IMO. --Gwern (contribs) 17:33 15 March 2008 (GMT)