Edsger W. Dijkstra

Who was Edsger W. Dijkstra?

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor.

Famous Quotes:

• Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
• The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
• The question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
• The argument against recursive procedures was always an efficiency argument: non-re-entrant code could be executed so much more efficiently. But with the advent of multiprogramming another need for felxible storage allocation has emerged. And if there are still machines in which the use of recursive routines is punished by too heavy a penalty, then I would venture the opinion that the structure of such a machine should now be called somewhat old-fashioned.