Thursday  2002-08-01   Software

Scholarly duties of the humble programmer

From EWD archive

Like most of us, Edsger has always believed it a scientist's duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he has put that conviction into practice. For the last four decades, he has been mailing copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as "EWDs", to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Edsger's writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.

A few random picks:

• "The humble programmer"
• "How do we tell truths that might hurt?"
• "What Computing Science is about"

A sad update: Dijkstra passed away on 2002-08-06