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Dijkstra’s statements considered beneficial

August 8th, 2002

The author of many of programming’s seminal treatises, Edsger Dijkstra, has died in the Netherlands.

Dijkstra’s letter to the Communications newsletter of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1968, titled Go to statement considered harmful, has long served as a rallying point in arguments supporting structured programming. Other early important writings from him are:


Programming Considered As A Human Activity
A constructive approach to the problem of program correctness
Stepwise program construction
Towards correct programs
Requirements of programming tools

And one of my personal favourites:

The humble programmer

If you are a programmer, you owe it to yourself to read as much of Dijkstra’s work as you can.

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