I doubt Dijkstra would have objected to a visual formalism that was, well, formal. Something like Peirce's existential graphs[1] for example. Dijkstra despised

I doubt Dijkstra would have objected to a visual formalism that was, well, formal. Something like Peirce's existential graphs[1] for example. Dijkstra despised sloppiness, probably as a consequence of growing up in a war-ravaged country where his group could only manage to beg an hour a week of computer time from the Americans. As you imply, the EWD is a treasure. I've read through the vast majority of the English language ones and it has deeply improved my understanding of "Computing Science." I personally enjoy his non-technical writing too, abrasiveness and all, but I know that's not to everyone's taste. If it isn't, it's easily skipped. I do wish I had some Dutch though to get the bits I missed. Edit: > He's got an anti-visual-programming rant in the archive as well It just occurred to me to ask, is this the one where he argues that any visual description by its nature overspecifies? That's one of the recurring themes in his work, specify everything that needs to be specified, but no more. Of course even a vector of glyphs is still in the end a visual representation, so things are always overspecified. For example a + b and b + a are, in some languages, exactly equivalent and it would be nice to be able to directly represent that rather than having it require additional knowledge of the semantics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph