Revisiting the EWDs

Dijkstra was the original hipster. He was blogging before blogging was cool. "For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as EWDs, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands." And, thanks to the efforts of the University of Texas at Austin CS Department, all of these EWDs have been accessible to the public conveniently.

I remember when I first discovered the EWDs as a fresh graduate student. I was mesmerized. I read them with a lot of joy. It was as if a new world had opened to me to discover. He had many insightful observations. I recommend all CSE graduate students to read the EWDs to grow their minds.

Now, I don't agree with Dijkstra on everything. He was too much of a perfectionist, and believed in getting things right in one shot. He had this to say on this:

There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.

In contrast to Dijkstra's position, I believe in rapid prototyping and that perfection comes from iteration.

Of course I still adore all the EWDs and respect Dijkstra all the same. I mean, look at these gems in the Wikiquotes page for Dijkstra:

• It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
• The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
• Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.
• The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.

Some of his writings can be construed as starting a flamewar (Are "Systems people" really necessary?  :-). But he always had an important point to make. In some of his EWDs, he role-played as the "Chairman of the Board" of the fictitious Mathematics Inc., "a company that commercialized mathematical theorems the same way that software companies commercialized computer programs". He did this to show how ridiculous it is to patent a theorem, algorithm, or code.

And then there is this: "The cruelty of teaching computer science."

This is a 30 page handwritten (beautifully) manifesto against the state of CS teaching then, which unfortunately got worse in the following years. The manifesto finishes with a bang!

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that is what education is about. Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.

And about Microsoft's closing of the MS Research at Silicon Valley: