diaries

Dijkstra and Van Wijngaarden

Submitted by egdaylight on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 17:54

Here's a comment from another reviewer for my paper on `Dijkstra's Rallying Cry...':

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paper
diary60s

ALGOL 60 Programming School

Submitted by egdaylight on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 13:00
Dated: 
5 and 6 April, 1961
ALGOL 60 Programming School at Brighton Technical College, April 1961

The Dijkstra family collected many things, including an advertisement in NATURE on 4 February 1961, which mentioned the ALGOL 60 Programming School to be held at Brighton Technical College on 5 and 6 April 1961.

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diary60s

University of Kent

Submitted by egdaylight on Sun, 04/03/2011 - 12:29
Dated: 
23 April 1981

At the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent, Dijkstra lectured on semantics preserving program transformations (cf. EWD776).

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diary80s

The peer group

Submitted by egdaylight on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 12:02
Dated: 
15 March 1981

Though Dijkstra's own research publications were cited a lot, he himself did not want to judge the quality of one's work in terms of number of citations, nor in terms of number of papers.

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diary80s

Trip to Warwick, IFIP WG 2.3

Submitted by egdaylight on Sun, 03/27/2011 - 16:53
Dated: 
16 March - 15 April, 1971

Dijkstra wrote a report in Dutch about his trip to Warwick (England), which took place right before Easter, 1971. The purpose of his trip was to attend an IFIP Working Group 2.3 meeting at Warwick University. Some points in Dijkstra's trip report are of general interest:

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diary70s

Letter from Wirth to Dijkstra

Submitted by egdaylight on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 13:36
Dated: 
19 March 1971

Wirth and Dijkstra were close colleagues, thoroughly studying each other's writings in 1971. But how close, exactly, were they? How did Wirth's views differ from those of Dijkstra? In my first attempt to address these matters, I shall discuss a letter Wirth sent to Dijkstra in March 1971.

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diary70s

Dijkstra the Linguist?

Submitted by egdaylight on Thu, 03/24/2011 - 16:37

Is it correct to say that Dijkstra reasoned linguistically during the late 1950s and early 1960s? A reviewer of the research paper `Dijkstra's Rallying Cry ...' expressed his reservations about this matter.

In the reviewer's own words:

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paper
diary60s

Automatic theorem proving

Submitted by egdaylight on Sun, 03/20/2011 - 10:39
Dated: 
28 February 1981

In a letter to Nils J. Nilsson, Dijkstra expressed his misgivings about research in artificial intelligence (AI). Only automatic theorem proving deserved his appraisal. (EWD778)

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diary80s

From Black Box to Grey Box?

Submitted by egdaylight on Thu, 03/17/2011 - 14:50

In the previous post, "The reliability problem in a nutshell", the pessimistic assumption was made that each program component could interact with any other component. This resulted in the exponential factor pN, with N equal to the number of components and p equal to the probability that a component is bug free.

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diary70s

Massaging the program

Submitted by egdaylight on Tue, 03/15/2011 - 14:25
Dated: 
8 February 1981

Given a specific function, called lambo, how do you prove that it is equal to its own inverse? Dijkstra's answer: by massaging a program that computes lambo. That is, by gradually transforming an original program that computes lambo into a symmetric program that is rather useless to the programmer but useful to the mathematician!

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diary80s

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