Edsger W. Dijkstra -- he will be missed

Edsger W. Dijkstra -- he will be missed

Posted Aug 8, 2002 15:42 UTC (Thu) by sayler (subscriber, #3164)
Parent article: Edsger W. Dijkstra

I received my computer science degree from the University of Texas, where Dr. Dijkstra taught before retiring. I never took the undergraduate class he offered (I was kind of intimidated at the time), but the professor who taught my Software Engineering class had him come in to lecture one day.

This software engineering class was very pragmatic, emphasizing methodical design, implentation, and testing. As I recall, Dr. Dijkstra gave his lecture near the end of our semester, by which time we had been heavily involved in something resembling a team development evironment for a few months.. There was a very corporate feeling to our regimen of meetings and reports.

So one day we all go to the faculty lounge to hear the esteemed professor speak. He comes in the door of the lounge appearing to me most unlike the kind of man who could write so forcefully about programming, dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt with a distinctly old-grandfather look on his face.

In his very soft-spoken manner, he told us that he beleived that the main problem with programmers was a lack of rigor. People were so concerned with coding and testing that they never learned how to write something correctly the first time. He asked us to prove the correctness of the code for a binary search and spent the next half-hour proceeding glumly as we slowly worked through the process with him.

I got the impression we were a vaguely dissapointing group of students who he could tell were not convinced of the validity of his approach. It wasn't even a bitter dissapointment, though. I felt as though he was someone who had totally convinced himself that he knew how to make the world a better place, but that noone was listening.

He answered our questions about "gotos considered harmful" (it was his editor's idea to give it the cute title) with what I considered obvious patience. He talked about how he really only was able to keep up on the research that people referred to him these days. And then the lecture was over.

Our professor and Dr. Dijkstra were good friends, and I hung around after class talking with them about computer science and Dijksta's past. I ended up in his office after a while and we chatted about the current state of the industry as he saw it, why he really liked Texas, and so on. He was so intelligent in his conversation--asked so many probling questions--that by the time I was done I felt both touched and exhausted. He put on his cowboy hat and walked out of the office with me and headed off to his next appointment.

That was the last time I saw Esdgar Dijkstra--the only real time I ever talked to him. But I feel that the world has lost a quiet crusader, and I feel a tug in my heart thinking about this old dean of computer science with his cowboy hat.

---

(Log in to post comments)