Most Irreal readers probably know the name Dijkstra, if only from his famous letter to the ACM entitled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” and his celebrated shortest path algorithm. In fact, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a giant in the field of Computer Science, A Turing Award winner, and a significant contributor to both the engineering and theoretical sides of Computer Science.
Krzysztof Apt has a long and interesting biographical article about Dijkstra in Inference. Although he was an astoundingly successful academic, Dijkstra didn’t do much formal publishing. Rather, he preferred to publish much of his work in private reports that he numbered consecutively and prefixed with his initials. There were 1,318 such reports totaling over 7,700 pages. He’d typically send photocopied copies of each report to about 20 colleagues chosen depending on the report’s subject matter.
Dijkstra was interested in formal methods and in particular about writing correct programs. He thought programming should be approached like Mathematics and that every program should come with a formal proof of correctness. He was, according to Apt, a friendly and personable man but his rigidly held views could be off-putting and were often interpreted as arrogance.
Apt’s article has many interesting vignettes from Dijkstra’s life including the fact that when he married he listed his profession as Programmer on the marriage license. The Dutch authorities rejected that on the grounds that there was no such profession. Most surprising of all, perhaps, is that the famous “considered harmful” phrase did not originate with him but was from Niklaus Wirth, an editor of the ACM at the time the letter was published. Dijkstra’s original title was “A Case against the GO TO Statement.”
If you have any interested at all in the history of our field—and, really, you should—you’ll want to read Apt’s article. It full of interesting facts you didn’t know.