It’s taken me a while to appreciate Edsger W. Dijkstra. I had a professor in college who used to comically refer to him as “fearless leader” whenever he mentioned some piece of bombastic wisdom from him. But, beyond the bombast, Dijkstra’s contributions to computer science and software engineering were seminal. Even though I didn’t pay as much attention to his ideas as I should’ve, they influenced me indirectly and one of them led me to ignore some avenues of thought that I wish I’d pursued earl...