Edsgar Wybe Dijsktra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, essayist.
- Arrogance in computer science is measuered in nano-Dijsktras
- Alan Kay, OOPSLA 1997, The computer revolution hasn't happened yet.
Personal
- obituary
- Eulogy
Publications
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful {Communications of the ACM} {1968 03}
- E. W. Dijkstra Archive
Associated Concepts
- semaphores
- vector
- stack
- Algol 60
Quotes
- Being a better programmer means being able to design more effective and trustworthy programs and knowing how to do that efficiently. It is about not wasting storage cells or machine cycles and about avoiding those complexities that increase the number of reasoning steps needed to keep the design under strict intellectual control.: GPS: My favorite quote (from one of his papers at the URI above) is
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- The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
- GS: Professor Edsger Dijkstra, at the ACN South Central Regional Conference, Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 November 1984
- Mathematical elegance, conceptual simplicity, and their companion, brevity of an unambiguous reference manual, are a condition sine qua non for any product reliable enough to attain stability.
- [L1 ]