ewds

Has anyone here actually learnt what Dijkstra advocates in almost all EWDs and used it to any benefit?

At the time of EWD35, his EWDs were non-official musings, written in Dutch, intended to be shared amongst interested colleagues and such.

The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD as prefix.

The chronicles are great; I like watching them today, like I enjoy reading EWDs today as well.

I've read a few of Dijkstra's EWDs, and his letter to the UT Budget Council re.

I cooked up this definition after noticing that the EWDs had been more or less Dijkstra's blog, long before the Web.

The more concrete the EWDs get the worse they are.

And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!

Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.

Dijkstra would distribute photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues; as many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copy, the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community.

More than 1300 EWDs have since been scanned, with a growing number transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.

I try to read this paper from the perspective of his overall work and writing, and I have read through a lot of the EWDs.

I think people are attracted more to the form of the EWDs and to it's melancholic tone, rather than to the content itself, which is confirmed by the huge popularity of the EWDs as compared to "The discipline of programming", which is the technical exposition of what Dijkstra really is proposing in the EWDs.

There are hundreds of EWDs and I haven't seen a single one where Dijkstra would talk about making programming languages simple to make comprehension straightforward, this is something that modern programming "gurus" are more likely to say.

For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry.