EWD 316: A Short Introduction To the Art of Programming

by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Genres: Computer Science

97 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1971

About the author

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor.

His influential 1968 paper "A Case against the GO TO Statement", later published by Niklaus Wirth with the title "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", introduced the phrase "considered harmful" into computing.

Reviews

[Yusuf Hacking · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title says what it is; it holds up to that. I find it very close to Henry James's "The Art of Fiction", at least at the beginning, which is a fascinating connection.