Interesting recent readsThis installment of Code Reads takes a huge leap from the world of academia and the historic foundations of our discipline to something more recent: Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto. In this passionate essay, Mitch Kapor extols the virtues of designing software with the user experience in mind, and advocates developing a profession of [...]
Code Reads 5 takes us from Dijkstra to Knuth, and his humorously titled “Structured Programming with Go To Statements“. In it, Knuth addresses how the field seems to have missed the real point of Dijkstra’s structured programming, and instead focused on mindlessly eliminating “go to” statements. Knuth quotes Hoare when saying the most [...]
Edsgar W. Dijkstra’s “Notes on Structured Programming” is definitely a meal. Its quite a lot for one Code Read. So I broke it into two parts. First, we had the appetizers, now here’s the main course.
Program families and evolving software
Dijkstra points out that programs exist in large families of similar programs. [...]
Edsgar W. Dijkstra’s “Notes on Structured Programming“, which is Code Read 4, stuck me as shockingly prescient - or perhaps it is just that we creators of software are very slow to learn these lessons. Surely something written almost 40 years ago should feel more dated than this., and we should have learned or [...]
The third Code Read that Scott Rosenberg chose was another Edsgar Dijkstra essay - this one called “The Humble Programmer“. Vastly oversimplifying, Dijkstra is making this very important point: despite all of our achievements, we are limited creatures, and our intellect can easily be overwhelmed by our own creations. Particularly as [...]
