Dijkstra at the University of Texas Austin

I was surprised to learn that Edsger Dijkstra had been a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.  I thought of Dijkstra only as a Dutch computer scientist.  UT has a nice tribute to Dr. Dijkstra on the web.  The world famous Dijkstra taught students at U.T.!  Wow.  That tribute article provides a very nice, detailed description of his career and the importance of his ideas.  The university has scanned many of his papers and makes them available online.  His famous article, “Go To statement considered harmful," is available as paper EWD 215: A Case against the GO TO Statement.  It is a short paper, 4 pages plus the cover page.  I recommend it as a short, very readable paper.  His "Notes on Structured Programming" is much longer, but very influential.  The university maintains an archive of Dijkstra's papers.

If you are curious about computer science, I cannot think of a better way to explore the field than to explore Dijkstra's writings.

Robert