An old interview of Dijkstra (1985)
In a 1985 interview, Edsger W. Dijkstra discussed the widening gap between computing science and industry practices. He emphasized the importance of good programming over clever programming and highlighted the need for changes in organizational structures within companies. Dijkstra also noted that the rise of personal computers has not necessarily improved user experience due to complexities in design and functional illiteracy among users.
- ▪Dijkstra was born in 1930 in Rotterdam and had a significant academic career in mathematics and computer science.
- ▪He observed that the gap between computing science and industry practices has widened over the years.
- ▪Dijkstra advocated for better training and organizational changes to improve software quality.
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Record
| Original publisher | Utexas |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/misc/vanVlissingenInterview.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 20:58:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | maUAXaC721LO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Interview Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Austin, 04–03–1985©Rogier F. van Vlissingen Biographical Details 1930: Born in Rotterdam, Holland 1948–1956: Studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Leyden 1952–1962: Worked at the Mathematical Center In Amsterdam—first ever person on payroll as programmer 1957: Married—Justice of the peace would not accept programmer as profession for the records, so theoretical physicist used instead. 1962–1973: Professor of Mathematics at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Holland 1973–1984: Burroughs Research Fellow and Professor Extraordinarius at Eindhoven— "Burroughs' smallest research lab was my study." 1984: Professor and Schlumberger Centennial Chair in computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Utexas.
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