I remember here the lessons Dijkstra gave about beauty and excellence through personal examples. His colleagues celebrated his works with the salute: “Beauty is Our Business”[1]. Dijkstra is one of the most revered computer scientist whose footprint on the fundamental ideas in computer science is now legendary.
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I now often share the following anecdotes with my students and to those I am trying to explain the concept of excellence.
Add to this Dijkstra’s conception of beautiful expression in the style and structure of the program and you have the most powerful quality control tool for programming. I think one is better off just throwing away a program that is not beautifully written with balanced and concise names. This is much easier than Fagan’s Inspection Method which is a more technical implementation of the same idea. A program that can not be easily read is an expression of convoluted and imprecise thinking and should be immediately discarded. Trust me, I learned it the hard way.
I also recall the effort that Dijkstra would invest in coming up with short and very brief names of variables so that the reader can concentrate on the structure of algorithm and not get lost in the wilderness of long names. The strive for coming up with names and their prefixes would often take major amount of time. But the result of this effort was an elegant system of notation which had simplicity, brevity and directness often not witnessed in other areas of computer science. His remarks on the use of imprecise and loose language used in papers were scathing, ruthless and some of his lampooning of bad style is now legendary. See for example this analysis of Dijkstra of a document. If the imprecise and loose language used in reports and papers needs to be stringently criticised, then one can imagine what high standards are required in writing clean and neat algorithms and programs. His algorithms are supreme examples of beauty, elegance, and conciseness and so are the algorithms designed by his colleagues and students.
I will relate about what grade I got in this course in a later blog “Fairness in Grading: A lesson by Dijkstra“
Dijkstra Posts:
- Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
- “How can we explain Edsger W. Dijkstra to those who didn’t know him?”
- Dijkstra and his contributions
References:
Please note that the title of this blog is taken from the following conference:
[1] Beauty is our Business: A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra, Texts and Monographs in Computer Science is published by Springer-Verlag, 1990, Editors: Feijen, W.H.J., A.J.M. van Gasteren, D. Gries, and Jayadev Misra.
See Also:
- Motivation: Why PhD?
What is PhD?
- What does it Mean to Have a PhD: Myths of Specialization and Departmental Expertise
- What is the Difference between MS/MPhil Research and PhD Research
- Why PhD is Difficult to Complete and Why there are so many ABDs and PhD Dropouts
- How Progress of Research is related to the Mood and Psychology of a PhD Student
Starting with your PhD
- How to Read a Research Paper and Extract Problem Statement and Thesis Statement
- How Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation Presents the State of the Art: Synthesis vs Listing
- What is a Problem Statement and its role in MS-PhD Research
- What is a Thesis Statement and its Role in PhD-MS Research
- What is meant by Rigor of PhD Research
- Beauty is Our Business – Mathematics, Excellence and the Great Dijkstra
- Conclusion vs Assumption in Research Writing- Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis
- PhD is about Pursuit of Excellence. Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
- Myth: Impact Factor Measures Real Impact
- Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
- Discerning the Forest from the Trees – The Insights from my PhD Supervisor JC Browne
- A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan’s Mind-Maps
- Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
- Lesser known dimensions of US Universities – Archives of history and literature
- Myth: We are backward because we Lag Behind in Science and Technology
- Myth: Mushrooming of HEIs in Pakistan
- Myth: Impact factor measures impact
- Myth: Increase in PhDs Increase Teaching Quality
- What is a PhD and What is its Definition
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