<story><title>E.W. Dijkstra Archive: The Humble Programmer</title><url>https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevindeasis</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to imagine what Djikstra would&amp;#x27;ve accomplished if he instead decided to focus on theoretical physics. Conversely, imagine what we would&amp;#x27;ve lost if we didn&amp;#x27;t have Djikstra as a programmer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d like to point out that Dijkstra&amp;#x27;s writing might arguably the best writing I&amp;#x27;ve seen from a programmer. English is not my first language and his writing is inspiring; if possible I&amp;#x27;d like to request if anyone can point me to a resource (apps, software, etc) so I can learn to write, speak, and converse like Dijkstra in this lecture?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gizmo</author><text>Dijkstra writes directly and with and air of authority, but his writing is not great. His style is pretentious and obfuscatory. Even worse, he uses his authoritative style to get away with tons of unsubstantiated assertions. Let&amp;#x27;s look at a passage from the linked lecture:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Those who want really reliable software will discover [authority!] that they must find means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with [unsubstantiated!], and as a result the programming process will become cheaper [unsubstantiated!]. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover [authority!] that they should not waste their time debugging [repeated assertion!], they should not introduce the bugs to start with [repeated assertion!].&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;He could just say:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;When creating reliable software debugging takes up much time. If we develop techniques that prevent these bugs from being introduced in the first place then programmers will become much more effective. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Good writing is terse and easy to understand. It should lead the reader from the premises to the conclusions. Good writing shouldn&amp;#x27;t contain pretentious detours. I don&amp;#x27;t think you should emulate Dijkstra.</text></comment>
<story><title>E.W. Dijkstra Archive: The Humble Programmer</title><url>https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevindeasis</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to imagine what Djikstra would&amp;#x27;ve accomplished if he instead decided to focus on theoretical physics. Conversely, imagine what we would&amp;#x27;ve lost if we didn&amp;#x27;t have Djikstra as a programmer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d like to point out that Dijkstra&amp;#x27;s writing might arguably the best writing I&amp;#x27;ve seen from a programmer. English is not my first language and his writing is inspiring; if possible I&amp;#x27;d like to request if anyone can point me to a resource (apps, software, etc) so I can learn to write, speak, and converse like Dijkstra in this lecture?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hga</author><text>I suppose, but unless he felt a true calling to become a  theoretical physicist, as is partly outlined in this piece, his decision was clearly right, for the previous golden age of physics was well over by late &amp;#x27;50s, and progress since then has been minimal compared to the &lt;i&gt;Thirty Years that Shook Physics&lt;/i&gt; (quantum theory: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;048624895X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;04...&lt;/a&gt;), General Relatively (still our best theory of gravity), and the revelations of the secrets of the nucleus.  Maybe also Feynman and company&amp;#x27;s development of the first quantum field theory.&lt;p&gt;There were of course a lot of things of smaller scope to be done, and the unification of EM and the weak nuclear force was in the future, as well as the imperfect Standard Model that adds the strong nuclear force, and we still haven&amp;#x27;t unified gravity and the other three fundamental forces, but programming was &lt;i&gt;wide open&lt;/i&gt;, and what you could do was rapidly improving as the machines were rapidly becoming faster and bigger.  ADDED: For example, the Electrologica X1 he did his Ph.D. thesis on was solid state, as in completely transistorized (no vacuum tubes) and had magnetic core memory, both major advances in the &amp;#x27;50s.&lt;p&gt;Heck, my calling was science, and I was strongly on that track as of 1968, but computers nonetheless gained a lot of my attention starting in the mid-late &amp;#x27;70s, as they did for Feynman starting with the Manhattan Project when &amp;quot;computers&amp;quot; were the operators of 10 digit electromechanical scientific calculators.</text></comment>