Edsger W. Dijkstra

And then I happened upon this quote, which I liked a lot as soon as I first heard it.

It goes, "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." And this is attributed to this guy, Edsger Dijkstra, who is a computer science pioneer, is also known for very spicy, acerbic opinions about different programming languages.

It might actually be apocryphal, but anyway, that doesn't really matter where the quote is from.

Yeah.

[upbeat music]

Also on Quanta this week, you can read an outsider's perspective on the Langlands program, which seeks to unify all of math, and a story about how genome doubling is a high-risk, high-reward strategy in evolution.

[upbeat music] We're gonna leave you today with Edsger Dijkstra himself speaking about programming languages at the first International Research conference on the History of Computing in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1976.

This clip comes from the Computer History Museum.

But this coordination also extends to managing pools of identical resources.

Which brings us to semaphores, originally invented by Edgar Dijkstra back in, what, 1965?

Yeah, they've been around for a while.

Because a lock is binary, it's either held or it isn't.

And so I happened to have to read through those.

As you'll see in the talk, uh, I had to read through those to, like, dumpster dive to find this one advertisement that Edsger Dijkstra, like, like, of the Dijkstra algorithm, like that Dijkstra, uh-

Programmer of the month

... refers to multiple times.

Oh, yeah, Casey

...

Edsger Dijkstra.

Yep.