Edsger Dijkstra

What they built

Invented the shortest-path algorithm (1956), mutual-exclusion semaphores, and the THE operating system with its layered structure. Wrote "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (1968), "A Discipline of Programming" (1976), and produced over 1,300 hand-written technical notes (EWDs) archived at UT Austin — a lifelong project of disciplined thinking-in-public.

In their own words

• "Software engineering has accepted as its charter 'How to program if you cannot.'" (EWD 1036, "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science," 1988.)
• "If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.'" (EWD 1036, 1988.)
• "We see to it that the programming language in question has not been implemented on campus so that students are protected from the temptation to test their programs." (EWD 1036, 1988 — his actual pedagogical proposal, not a joke.)
• "The vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged its tacit assumption that doing mathematics will remain very much the same type of mental activity it has always been." (EWD 1036, 1988.)
• "The computer industry must not kill computing science while it remains unable to save itself." (EWD 1284, 1999.)
• "If you visualize me looking over your shoulders saying 'Dijkstra would not have liked this' — that's enough immortality for me." (EWD 1213, 1995.)

Principles as they articulated them

• Program correctness should be proved hand-in-hand with program construction, not retrofitted by testing ("testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs").
• Computing science is a branch of mathematics concerned with symbol manipulation, and must be taught as such — starting with predicate calculus, not with a running machine (EWD 1036).
• Beauty is a necessary criterion of technical merit: "Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure" (EWD 1284).
• Radical simplicity: hide the operational behavior of a program; reason from its text alone.

What surprised me in research

• EWD 1036 is not a rhetorical provocation but a concrete curriculum proposal: Dijkstra literally wanted first-year students to work in an unimplemented formal language so they could not test code.
• His "Doomed Discipline" attack on software engineering was delivered from inside an engineering school (UT Austin) and partly as a response to being hired there — a defiant gesture, not an academic's safe opinion.
• In the late EWDs (1200s-1300s) he writes with growing isolation about how the commercial computing industry has captured and coarsened the discipline he helped found. The tone is elegiac more than triumphant.

Recent or later work

Held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair at UT Austin 1984-2000; retired to Nuenen, Netherlands, where he died of cancer in August 2002. His last EWDs (c. EWD 1300+) returned repeatedly to pedagogy, formal calculation of programs, and the decline of intellectual standards in computing. The PODC Influential Paper Award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize in his honor shortly before his death. UT Austin maintains the complete EWD archive as a scanned and transcribed corpus — an unusual monument for a computer scientist.

Sources

• https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html — "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science" (EWD 1036) — cs.utexas.edu
• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra — Dijkstra quotes compilation — wikiquote.org
• https://inference-review.com/article/the-man-who-carried-computer-science-on-his-shoulders — Krzysztof Apt profile — inference-review.com
• https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ — EWD Archive — cs.utexas.edu