wsc981on Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Short Introduction to the Art of Programming (1971) [pdf]”
Not directly related, but here’s a short documentary on his life and career (Dutch spoken, English subtitles): link to this video
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#edsgerdijkstra#formalmethods#programmingdiscipline
Edsger W. Dijkstra on Dutch TV
Yin Wang
395 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
- Presented by Edsger W. Dijkstra, computer scientist
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
44K views12 years ago2 recommendations
History and cultureComputer scienceHistory of computingPeople who shaped computingComputation and complexity
A 2001 Dutch television documentary profiling computer science pioneer Edsger Dijkstra and his views on mathematical elegance and programming discipline.
For convenience of viewing, this video is downloaded from cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video-audio/NoorderlichtVideo.html In the autumn of 2000, the Dutch broadcasting organization VPRO Television visited Austin to make a video of a visit with the most famous Dutch computing scientist. The product of this project was broadcast in April 2001 as a 25-minute episode of the science series Noorderlicht, under the title "Denken Als Discipline". It is available in Dutch, with English subtitles, as a 300MB MPEG-1 file. Thanks to Jos Wassink, Producer/director, and Karin Spiegel, Executive producer, for permission to reproduce it. Thanks to Chris Kotrla for creating the MPEG file from a DVD.Why it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended for providing a human look at Dijkstra and his philosophy on software elegance and simplicity.
wsc981on Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic”
Perhaps not completely related to this topic, but interesting nonetheless, a small picture into Dijkstra's life from Dutch tv (subtitled in English): link to this video
jamezon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders”
Good read. For anyone interested in seeing the human side of Dijkstra, I recommend this documentary: link to this video When I watched it I was both studying Computer Science and learning Dutch, so it was twice as interesting. The version I linked provides English subtitles.
u/MirrorLakein r/compsci • Mentions
On “A word from Dijkstra”
He also invented the semaphore and considered himself to be the first programmer in the Netherlands, on the grounds that he tried to put "programmer" as his profession on his marriage application and was rejected because they had no record of the profession existing. PDF / Text
Also, here's a short documentary with more interviews with him.
link to this video
jquaston Hacker News • Mentions
On “Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years”
From Edsger Dijkstra: link to this video > ...just after the first successful moon landing ... I knew that each Apollo flight required some 40,000 new lines of code. ... I was duly impressed that they got so many lines of code correct. So when I met Joel, I said, "how did you do that? ... Getting that software right." ... He said that in one of the calculations of the orbit of the lunar module the moon had been defined as repelling instead of attracting. They had discovered that error by accident. Imagine, by accident five days before the shot. Sound familiar to anyone? Some 16 years experience myself, the clarity of "the problem of time" has become the foremost factor of bad software that I kn…
edjrooton Hacker News • Mentions
On “Efficiency is fundamentally at odds with elegance (2013)”
I recently watched a documentary where Dijkstra says the opposite: link to this video "One of the things I discovered as early as the 1960s is that mathematical elegance is not a question of aesthetics, of taste or fashion, but something you can translate into a technical notion. "The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives as one of the meanings of 'elegant' 'ingeniously simple and effective'. "In practice a program is manageable if you make a truly elegant program, firstly because it is shorter than most alternatives and consists of discrete parts, each of which you can replace by an alternative implementation without influencing the rest of the program, but also, curiously, the most elegant programs are oft…