Dijkstra interview (subtitled, 24 mins, 300MB) [mpg video]

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video.html

by 10ren • 17 years ago

24 11 17 years ago

cs.utexas.edu

yannis• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting it. Very interesting to note that Dijkstra advocates that a program should have no version numbers!

JBiserkov2• 17 years ago

Because version 1 should be feature-complete and perfect like a Mozart composition.

And that's very hard to achieve and market/sell.

+ He doesn't take into account the technical advantages that make new features plausible (Live Preview in Office 2007 comes to mind).

His views are a bit extreme, but still we can learn from him. Although we are not programming for non-existent machines, I've found(the hard way) that thinking hard about a problem can save countless man-hours in development(of unnecessary features), debugging(an overly-complex implementation) and maintenance(of inflexible designs, that result from diving straight in problem-area you don't understand).

I enjoyed the video because I haven't seen him before, but it's far from the dense talks I'm used to.

May be I should read his Turing award lecture.

edw519• 17 years ago

"...thinking hard about a problem can save countless man-hours in development..., debugging...and maintenance..."

Interesting.

I find the exact opposite is just as effective. When I stop thinking so hard and just release the problem, a much better approach often comes back to me when I least expect it. This is a very hard thing to do. Once it worked a few times, I learned to develop a little faith in my inner "background processor".

wizardofoz• 17 years ago

On Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6873628658308030363...

ars• 17 years ago

Can someone post just the subtitles? (So I can read/skim them.)

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

As I figure not everyone here has a blazingly fast connection and the Google Video link was pretty low quality, I've uploaded a mirror here:

http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/dijkstra.html

(Direct link: http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/dijkstra.mp4 , 44MB MP4)

joris• 17 years ago

Note that there are quite some mistakes in the subtitles, many of them changed the meaning. For example "We mogen niet uit nonchalance fouten in een programma aanbrengen. Dat moeten we systematisch en met zorg doen." (12:00) is translated to "We should not introduce errors through sloppiness, but systematically keep them out." whereas it should be "We should not introduce errors through sloppiness, but do this [the introduction of errors] systematically and with care."

321abc• 17 years ago

Alan Kay bashing Dijkstra -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7ROTJKkhuI

Dijkstra interview (subtitled, 24 mins, 300MB) [mpg video]

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