The Manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra
7 comments
·November 9, 2025PaulRobinson
I once had one of his quote on the back of my business card when I was doing a lot of software dev consultancy: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
I keep meaning to sit down with this site and make my way through it all. Might make more progress if I grab them into an eReader-friendly format and then peruse them more easily when travelling.
peterkelly
The most important one in the context of 2025 is this one:
On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
sfn42
I love that essay. It's such a joy to read, and even though it is very short and to the point it says so much both about the topic itself and society at large.
And its just so obviously correct.
quantum_state
Truly a treasure trove … unfortunately, much of the wisdom from people like Dijkstra seems to have been forgotten or ignored by the software engineering industry.
RoguePixelDC
Since I've been playing around with AI a lot lately, I'd suggest taking a few papers and uploading them for context...seeing good examples vastly improves their subsequent programming ability.
bobsh
This is a treasure (it’s been around quite a while). For those youngers out there: still completely relevant. Still ahead of the game, imho.
Something which I occasionally link to, is this: <https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF>. It not only shows why computer languages should start their indexes at 0 (instead of 1), but also shows why intervals should be specified as lower-inclusive and upper-exclusive.