Talk:Edsger W. Dijkstra

Clarification

Someone please clarify the sentence "In a 2001 interview, he stated a desire for "elegance," whereby the correct approach would be to process thoughts mentally, rather than attempt to render them until they are complete.". It is unclear to me what is meant by that statement.

Isn't it rather self-explanatory? The elegance Dijkstra stood for was a(n applied) variant of mathematical elegance. He rejected the anglo-saxon concept of iterative learning (= repeat until success has been reached). Before you started doing something he wanted you to know where you were planning to go and how you were going to do so. You shouldn't begin writing down a sentence before you knew exactly how it was going to end,...You could suspect that the 'backspace' and 'delete' key on a keyboard were abominations to him, because they encouraged slopiness. So the main idea is that you should always structure your thought mentally before outputting anything into the physical world.

Software Engineer

It's a bit ironic he is being called a software engineer when he was against that term. Perhaps software developer is more appropriate?Zvtok (talk) 23:03, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Death

His death is both mentioned in the biography section under "last years", as well as in the "death" section. Should one be removed? 217.105.2.26 (talk) 17:24, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Massive content removal (July 2022)

@Eem dik doun in toene: Since the latest changes are very drastic (removing a lot of material that isn't obviously wrong from glancing through it), I was wondering if you could explain further here in the talk page what's going on. Thanks, Caleb Stanford (talk) 18:31, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Answered here. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:13, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Full citation needed for Apt 2002

There is a reference used 12 times in this article in short format that is never spelled out in full. Right now it is Ref #16, to Apt 2002. It is done using template for harvnb, and thus appears in blue highlight, but links nowhere. Does anyone know what is the full citation? It can be added under a new section head Bibliography, or entered in full the first time it us used, in Biography. - - Prairieplant (talk) 18:28, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Might the source be this journal article? “Krzysztof R. Apt:

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002): A Portrait of a Genius. Formal Aspects Comput. 14(2): 92-98 (2002)”

I do not have access to the text of the article to check if it might be the intended source. I found the article citation with a search of Krzysztof R. Apt‘s name on google. Is it possible that Krzysztof R. Apt wrote a book as well as this journal article? - - Prairieplant (talk) 18:42, 9 November 2022 (UTC)