Edsger Dijkstra: 1930-2002

[Duane Morin]

If Dijkstra's passing has gotten people into a reflective mood about our 
science's founding fathers, let me point out "Out of Their Minds" which I 
happened to have sitting on my bookshelf at work.  Not only does it have a 
chapter on Dijkstra ("Appalling Prose and the Shortest Path", 13pgs), 
other greats are covered:
  Backus, McCarthy, Kay, Rabin, Knuth, Tarjan, Lamport, Cook and Levin,
  Brooks, Smith, Hillis, Feigenbaum, Lenat
Each basically has their own chapter.  They are organized into Linguists, 
Algorithmists, Architects, and Sculptors of Machine Intelligence.

One of my favorite books.  "In the Company of Giants" is another one that 
does a similar thing with the industry leaders of today, but it's just not 
the same.

Duane

 On 
Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> We sure did. Dijkstra's work made modern operating systems possible. Could 
> we have a modern OS without his semaphores. 
> On 8 Aug 2002 at 8:31, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Wow.  We lost a great one.
> > 
> > As it happens, a couple of months ago I was stuck on a hard problem
> > (distributed termination of some asynchronous processes).  For a
> > couple of days I deeply pondered this problem, and then I eventually
> > found a paper that Dijkstra wrote on this subject.  The paper was
> > clear enough, and it took me an hour to implement this algorithm.
> > Bingo -- problem solved.  Dijkstra's paper helped me solve a difficult
> > problem with a minimum of hassle.
> > 
> > He will be missed.
> > 
> > --kevin
> > -- 
> > Kevin D. Clark / Cetacean Networks / Portsmouth, N.H. (USA)
> > cetaceannetworks.com!kclark (GnuPG ID: B280F24E)
> > alumni.unh.edu!kdc
> > 
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>