Selected writings on computing: a personal perspective

• Authors: Edsger W. Dijkstra
• Venue: Selected writings on computing: a personal perspective
• Year: 1982

Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time that is, when not travelling!-- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series", which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree.) The decision to publish a selection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -- preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.-- the actual selection process was much easier than I had feared. Harder to decide was the question to how much editing the selected texts should be subjected. When the texts are viewed as historical documents, their editing should be minimal. When David Gries went through the texts with his fine-toothed comb he revealed so many opportunities for improvement that, eventually, the editing became quite extensive. As a result, the texts as published are not representative of my mastery of the English language. A major obstacle to publication was my insistence that selected trip reports be included. Having decided that the selection should be representative, I had no choice, since the period in question covers years during which I was on the road a third of the time. Furthermore, few of my texts reflect my feelings and attitudes more clearly than the trip reports. (It has been remarked that my trip reports are more revealing about their author than about the people and places visited.) There was only one snag: there is no tradition of publishing such comments. While performing artists are quite used to being judged publicly by their peers, performing scientists are not. (Reviews of published books and articles are the closest approximation.)