The only way in which you can see the algorithm is as a FORTRAN program.

And what’s the answer then for our fu-
ture students to avoid the same trap?

Teach them, as soon as possible, a decent programming language that exercises their power of abstraction. During 1968 in Garmisch I learned that in the ears of the Americans, a “ mathematical engineer” [such as we educated in Eindhoven] was a contradiction in terms: the American mathematician is an impractical academic, whereas the American engineer is practical but hardly academically trained. You notice that all important words carry different, slightly different meanings. I was disappointed in America by the way in which it rejected ALGOL 60. I had not expected it. I consider it a tragedy because it is a symptom of how the United States is becoming more and more a-mathematical, as Morris Kline illustrates eloquently. 9 Precisely in the century which witnesses the emergence of computing equipment, it pays so much to have a well-trained mathematical mind.

 

In 1963 peter patton, in Communications of the ACM, wrote that european programmers are fiercely independent loners whereas Americans are team players. or is it the other way?

At the Mathematical Centre, we used to cooperate on large projects and apply a division of labor; it was something of a shock when I went to the Department of Mathematics at Eindhoven where everybody worked all by himself. After we had completed the THE System, for instance, Nico Habermann wrote a thesis about the Banker’s Algorithm, and about scheduling, sharing, and deadlock prevention. The department did not like that because it was not clear how much he had done by himself. They made so much protest that Cor Ligtmans, who should have written his Ph.D. thesis on another aspect of THE System, refused to do so.

Is the outcome of the curricula differ-
ent in europe and America?

I must be very careful with answering this because during my absence, the role of the university, the financing of the university, and the fraction

in many places,
departments of
computer science
were founded before
the shape of the
intellectual discipline
stood out clearly.

of the population it is supposed to address have changed radically. That already started in the 1970s. So whatever I say about the [European] university is probably idealized by memory. Yes. But a major difference was that the fence around the university campus was higher. To give you an example, when we started to design a computing science curriculum in the 1960s, one of the firm rules was that no industrial product would be the subject of an academic course. It’s lovely. This immediately rules out all Java courses, and at the time it ruled out all FORTRAN courses. We taught ALGOL 60, it was a much greater eye-opener than FORTRAN.

Is there a relationship between the
curriculum and the nature of funding
of universities?

Yes. It has the greatest influence on the funding of research projects. Quite regularly I see firm XYZ proposing to give student fellowships or something and then, somewhere in the small print, that preference will be given to students who are supervised by professors who already have professional contact with the company.

Why do computer science depart-
ments often come out of electrical
engineering in the u.s.—but not in eu-
rope?

A major reason is timing. For fi-
nancial reasons, Europe, damaged by
World War II, was later. So the Ameri-
can computing industry emerged ear-
lier. The computing industry asked
for graduates, which increased the
pressure on the universities to supply
them, even if the university did not
quite know how. In many places, de-
partments of computer science were
founded before the shape of the intel-
lectual discipline stood out clearly.

“Information” came a bit later on?

It was the French that pushed in-formatique. Today the English prefer Information Technology, IT, and Information Systems, IS. I think the timing has forced the American departments to start too early. And they still suffer from it. Here, at the University of Texas, you can still observe it is the Department of Computer Sciences. If you start to think about it, you can only laugh, but that time there were at least as many computer sciences as there were professors.

 

References

1. dijkstra, e. W. a constructive approach to the problem of program correctness. BIT 8, 3 (1968), 174–186.

2. dijkstra, e. W. a note on two problems in connection with graphs. Numerische Mathematik 1 (1959), 269–271.

3. dijkstra, e. W. Communication with an automatic computer. Ph.d. dissertation, university of amsterdam, 1959.

4. dijkstra, e. W. Go to statement considered harmful, Commun. ACM 11, 3 (Mar. 1968), 147–148.

5. dijkstra, e. W. Hierarchical ordering of sequential processes. Acta Informatica 1 (1971), 115–138.

6. dijkstra, e. W. notes on structured programming.

In o.-J. dahl, e. W. dijkstra, and C.a.r. Hoare, eds., Structured Programming. academic Press, london, 1972, 1–82.

7. dijkstra, e. W. over de IbM 360, e Wd 255, n.d., circulated privately; http://www.cs.utexas.edu/ users/ eWd/ewd02xx/eWd255.PdF

8. dijkstra, e. W. recursive programming. Numerische Mathematik 2 (1960), 312–318.

9. Kline, M. Mathematics in Western Culture. Penguin books ltd., Harmondsmorth, Middlesex, england, 1972.

10. Menduno, M. atlas shrugged: When it comes to online road maps, why you can’t (always) get there from here. Scientific American 283, 11 (nov. 2000), 20–22.

11. randell, b. and buxton, J.n., eds., Software Engineering Techniques: A Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee (rome, Italy, oct. 1969), nato, 1970.