> for a one-year project coding is not allowed to start before the ninth month! Early in his career Dijkstra had to write an operating system for a machine tha

> for a one-year project coding is not allowed to start before the ninth month! Early in his career Dijkstra had to write an operating system for a machine that had not yet been built. So he wrote the whole thing on paper, working only from the spec. When the machine arrived, his OS pretty much worked. This experience shaped his view of programming for the rest of his life. He came of age when you had to write programs where there was no machine (or you couldn't often get to the machine). That's not a typical situation now - Dijkstra was the very first programmer in Holland. (He later met a group faced with a similar delayed delivery that had not begun work -- he was amazed to hear that they were "waiting for the machine".)