what a charming time it was when that generation discovered a bunch of stuff that now undergirds daily life:
“ Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands. “
random sample of a trip note in which he is in ited to consult on a project that he thinks ought to be killed:
Nonetheless, Prof. Baurer was not a loser. According to some sources he contributed to the invention of the notion of "stack" and "software engineering" among other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_L._Bauer
> ... cannot be expected from the average programmer
Ha! He had to deal with the political B.S. of well-spoken self-important people who spend excessively long and write excessively long code/proofs getting accolades over those that just get things done in the best way! I feel for him!
Good read. Completely off topic: He traveled by sleeper train and mentioned that he slept reasonably well and very well on the return trip. In the beginning of my career I made nearly the opposite trip to Brussels by sleeper to a completely useless lobbying/networking event with little tangible content. Often sleep in sleepers is not very good. But on the return trip I only wake up when the train had already stopped at my destination and had to get off very hastily. Not only CS was more fun without AI slop, but traveling, too ;)
Digistra’s writing, trip report to Munich, a mechanical repair where a three-fold deduction takes place between 26-27 Nov. 1976.
The prose strikes one in the vein of a 20th century existential writer.