Edsger W. Dijkstra on Dutch TV

What Hacker News said

Recommends wsc981 · 2018-05 · 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): [this video]

Recommends wsc981 · 2019-01 · 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): [this video]

Recommends jamez · 2020-10 · 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: [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.

Cites jquast · 2015-03 · on “Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years”

From Edsger Dijkstra: [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

Cites edjroot · 2018-12 · on “Efficiency is fundamentally at odds with elegance (2013)”

I recently watched a documentary where Dijkstra says the opposite: [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