Interesting recent readsEdsgar 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 [...]
Edsger W. Dijkstra, a giant of computer science, wrote an article long ago arguing that the “goto” statement was bad for programmers and the programs they wrote. Week 2 of Code Reads covers this article.
The statement “goto is bad” is exactly the kind of attention getting statement that provokes internecine fights between partisans of various [...]
