I think Peter Medewar once said of James Watson and Francis Crick that "they have done somthing worth being arrogant about". The same applies to Dijkstra. You

I think Peter Medewar once said of James Watson and Francis Crick that "they have done somthing worth being arrogant about". The same applies to Dijkstra. You could start with this account of the Dijkstra-Zonneveld Algol 60 compiler written by Kruseman Aretz: https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/4155 https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/4155.