E.W.Dijkstra Archive
cs.utexas.edu
cs.utexas.edu
“ Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. 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. “
random sample of a trip note in which he is in ited to consult on a project that he thinks ought to be killed:
Ha! He had to deal with the political B.S. of well-spoken self-important people who spend excessively long and write excessively long code/proofs getting accolades over those that just get things done in the best way! I feel for him!
The prose strikes one in the vein of a 20th century existential writer.
It is Dijkstra's recounting of Operating System design with the notion of the first concurrent computer and interrupt.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.PDF
I am reminded of Salieri's reaction to Mozart's manuscripts in the movie Amadeus.
There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken.
(For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.)
Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.
Dijkstra’s I/O apparatus corresponds to communication mechanisms for tape reading.