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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

> As a formal Software Engineer, I now consider him to be possibly the most enlightened engineer that's ever existed in the field.

On one hand, his quotes have the ring of wisdom. On the other, the man was famously not an engineer and never brought a software project to fruition, to my knowledge.

These aren't necessarily contradictory, but you should keep it in mind. Knuth is much more of an engineer in the sense it's used on HN.

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Knuth is brilliant and wonderfully pragmatic, no doubt. I think the greatest thing Knuth really got into me is that code is meant for people, not computers.

As to Dijkstra; enlightenment doesn't necessarily mean productive. Some of the least successful people I've ever met, can have absolutely sage like advice. Dijkstra was able to visualize things others could not, and explain novel solutions to those. On top of that he had a deep understanding of the life of a programmer and the complexities faced day in and day out.

> Some of the least successful people I've ever met, can have absolutely sage like advice.

You learn from mistakes. Unsuccessful = many mistakes?

The kind of creativity and acceptance of uncertainty that leads to insight is often at odds with the narrow focus get-it-done tenacity associated with success. Some people have more of the former without the ability to switch to the latter.

Dijkstra worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum (mathematics center) in the 1950s. He was responsible for most of the systems programming of three subsequent machines that were build and used there. His PhD dissertation (1959) was on the operating system he wrote for the Electrologica X1 computer that was being built by the first Dutch computer industry Electrologica.

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