Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Edsger Dijkstra

This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algorithm, for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, but Dijkstra's work covers a large range of topics over 5 decades, from code quality to complexity to concurrent programming, and programming languages.

In this episode, we talked specifically about the following works, including the original paper where Dijkstra first published what we now call "Dijkstra's algorithm":

• Notes on structured programming
• Solution of a problem in concurrent program control (1965)
• Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs (1959)
• Go To Statement Considered Harmful

This episode is part I of our Dijkstra discussion. We'll be back next week for more.

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