diary70s

My diary on what Dijkstra did in the 1970s.

Physics and reasoning by analogy

Dated: 

June 1972

Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare's book "Structured Programming" was published in June 1972. Dijkstra wrote the first chapter, `Notes on Structured Programming', in which he introduced several new ideas. One of Dijkstra's main points was that mathematical techniques for small demonstration programs do not necessarily work for programs a thousand times larger.

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Three Snapshots of Dijkstra's Career

“I still remember it well, the day my future husband entered my life”, Ria Debets-Dijkstra recalls. “He was a good-looking man, 20 years of age. He entered our Computing Department with a cane!” [1]. The Computing Department was part of the newly founded Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam. Ria Debets-Dijkstra had already been working there for two years before she saw Edsger Dijkstra on that eventful day in 1951. Dijkstra officially joined the Computing Department in March of the following year.

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Turing award lecture — an analogy with physics

Dated: 

early 1972

Dijkstra contributed greatly to introducing hierarchical systems into computing. Already in his very first report of 1953 as employee of the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, Dijkstra introduced what he would later call separate levels of concern [1]. In 1959–60, he acquired fame after reformulating the problem of ALGOL translation as an hierarchical problem. His intermediate machine-independent stack-based language was, in hindsight, a precursor to the now widely used virtual machine; see chapter 3 in my book The Dawn of Software Engineering [2].

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Running away from a problem

Dated: 

late 1971 -- early 1972

Some former colleagues of Dijkstra have stressed in interviews with me that Dijkstra was not an engineer (in accordance with their definition of the term). By discussing Dijkstra's characteristic top-down design perspective in my previous post, I have already given one reason why Dijkstra was perceived as a non-engineer. Below I present another reason. While doing so we will again encounter the dichotomy between performance and generality, a dichotomy which Dijkstra seems to have stressed throughout his whole career.

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From Turing to Dijkstra, Part II

Dated: 

August 1971

In a previous post I scrutinized Moshe Y. Vardi's account of Church and Turing. During the past months I refined that post and added it to the first chapter of my recent book The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra. I now present a summary of my book and briefly explain how Turing's work influenced Dijkstra's thinking. The book has just appeared in print.

Summary

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Summer school: Marktoberdorf, July 1971

Dated: 

2 August 1971

Roughly 80 participants from 15 countries participated in the 1971 summer school in Marktoberdorf. According to Dijkstra, some participants were very theoretically inclined, others more practically minded. Viewed from the present day, the following list of speakers at that summer school is impressive. Dijkstra attributed a theme to each speaker, with the exception of Perlis and Dahl:

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Letter from McKeag to Dijkstra

Dated: 

22 July 1971

The T.H.E. multiprogramming system — as designed and implemented by Dijkstra, Bron, Habermann, Hendriks, Ligtmans, and Voorhoeve — was studied by Mike McKeag during his visit to Eindhoven some time during the first half of 1971. Subsequently, McKeag went back to his university in Belfast (in Hoare's research group) where he wrote a report of the T.H.E. system. That report was sent to Dijkstra on 22 July 1971 with a cover letter stating:

Dear Professor Dijkstra,

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First trip with Ria to North America.

Dated: 

Summer 1971

Dijkstra visited the USA several times before moving to Texas in 1984. In the summer of 1971, he went on a trip to the USA and Canada. It wasn't his first trip to North America, but it was the first time his wife Ria accompanied him. The corresponding trip report was written by Dijkstra on June 23rd, 1971 in EWD312.

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