Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective

by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series," which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.

Genres: Computer Science, Programming, Computers, Technology, Nonfiction

362 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1982

About the author

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor.

His influential 1968 paper "A Case against the GO TO Statement", later published by Niklaus Wirth with the title "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", introduced the phrase "considered harmful" into computing.

Reviews

[Max Lybbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dijkstra's always the best. This book is a (slightly edited) collection of EWDs. I'm amazed at how interested I was in the trip reports; especially the one about visiting the USSR.

But the other, more technical, EWDs are very useful, even thirty-five years later. And Mathematics, Inc. EWDs are pure gold.

[Gustavo Chaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

More interesting articles: 407, 447, 480, 494, 498*, 508, 512, 513, 561*, 563, 575, 584, 585, 594, 603, 611, 618, 635, 636, 637*, 648*, 678*