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You've certainly reproduced Dijkstra's opinion on the matter faithfully. Given that his life's work was pretty much to jet between conferences and bad-mouth tho

You've certainly reproduced Dijkstra's opinion on the matter faithfully. Given that his life's work was pretty much to jet between conferences and bad-mouth those of his colleagues who actually DID produce useful software, it stands to reason that he would elevate mathematics over engineering.

goldenkey 10y ago
Dijkstra contributed so much to actual computer science. You are way off base. Leslie Lamport was also a magnimonious computer scientist. Guess what his PHD was in? Mathematics with a dissertation in singularities of analytic partial differential equations. CS is absolute monkey business without a real mathematics education. Face it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport
- microtherion 10y ago
  It's not that mathematics does not have its uses as a tool. However, there is a big difference between pragmatists like Lamport and Knuth, who used their mathematical knowledge in the service of engineering projects, like building their own text processing system, and dogmatists like Dijkstra, who relied on underlings to type up his handwritten papers so he would not have to sully his hands by touching an actual computer. Granted, Dijkstra did make some contributions to CS, but he also caused immense damage to CS education by promoting his vision of CS as exclusively a branch of applied mathematics, instead of an engineering discipline employing mathematics as one of several tools. That mentality has led to much preaching about constructing programs using top-to-bottom formal methods, and very few useful programs constructed that way.
random314 10y ago
Are you talking about the Dijkstra who wrote one of the earliest operating systems that introduced most of the OS concepts we use today, including mutual exclusion algorithms, deadlock detection and prevention, kernel/user mode etc or are you talking about someone else?
- microtherion 10y ago
  While the THE multiprogramming system may have had these, Multics had them roughly at the same time, and I'm pretty sure today's operating systems trace their use of these concepts back to Multics, rather than THE.
  - random314 10y ago
    Amazing he did all these when jetting between conferences. Can I quote you as a reference when arguing on the Internet that our OS concepts do not owe anything to Djikstra, who was only jetting between conferences? It sounds like you are pretty sure.

goldenkey 10y ago

Dijkstra contributed so much to actual computer science. You are way off base. Leslie Lamport was also a magnimonious computer scientist. Guess what his PHD was in? Mathematics with a dissertation in singularities of analytic partial differential equations. CS is absolute monkey business without a real mathematics education. Face it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

microtherion 10y ago
It's not that mathematics does not have its uses as a tool. However, there is a big difference between pragmatists like Lamport and Knuth, who used their mathematical knowledge in the service of engineering projects, like building their own text processing system, and dogmatists like Dijkstra, who relied on underlings to type up his handwritten papers so he would not have to sully his hands by touching an actual computer. Granted, Dijkstra did make some contributions to CS, but he also caused immense damage to CS education by promoting his vision of CS as exclusively a branch of applied mathematics, instead of an engineering discipline employing mathematics as one of several tools. That mentality has led to much preaching about constructing programs using top-to-bottom formal methods, and very few useful programs constructed that way.

random314 10y ago

Are you talking about the Dijkstra who wrote one of the earliest operating systems that introduced most of the OS concepts we use today, including mutual exclusion algorithms, deadlock detection and prevention, kernel/user mode etc or are you talking about someone else?

microtherion 10y ago
While the THE multiprogramming system may have had these, Multics had them roughly at the same time, and I'm pretty sure today's operating systems trace their use of these concepts back to Multics, rather than THE.
- random314 10y ago
  Amazing he did all these when jetting between conferences. Can I quote you as a reference when arguing on the Internet that our OS concepts do not owe anything to Djikstra, who was only jetting between conferences? It sounds like you are pretty sure.