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| author | mjkwiatkowski <mati.rewa@gmail.com> | 2026-01-11 14:13:00 +0100 |
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| committer | mjkwiatkowski <mati.rewa@gmail.com> | 2026-01-11 14:13:00 +0100 |
| commit | b56e4a6a679a3151b02749edc0028ce909037cdc (patch) | |
| tree | cd69d3f843b97af3d6c9125d6419ce852248d867 /public/posts/dijkstra-knuth | |
| parent | e6bfc9a947302e290e846f8e7e884af8b329328b (diff) | |
fix: fixed the non-working list of book posts
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| -rw-r--r-- | public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html | 84 |
1 files changed, 84 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html b/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f509fd1 --- /dev/null +++ b/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +<head><script src="/livereload.js?mindelay=10&v=2&port=1313&path=livereload" data-no-instant defer></script> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/images/favicon-32x32.png"> + <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/images/favicon-16x16.png"> + <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" /> + <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/fonts.css" /> + <script async type="text/javascript" src="js/code.js"> </script> +</head> + +<div class="container"> + <ul id="bar"> + + <li> + <a href="/">go back</a> + </li> + <li>|</li> + + <li> + <a href="mailto:mati.rewa@gmail.com">mati.rewa@gmail.com</a> + </li> + <li>|</li> + <li> + <a href="https://git.denounce.ai/">git.denounce.ai</a> + </li> + <li>|</li> + <li> + <a href="https://ohmyghost.nl">ohmyghost.nl</a> + </li> + <li>|</li> + <li> + <a href="https://atlarge-research.com/mkwiatkowski/">research</a> + </li> + <li>|</li> + <li> + <a href="/books">book blog</a> + </li> +</ul> + + +</div> +</div> +<div class="container"> + <h2>Dijkstra and Knuth</h2> + <p>It has long lingered on my mind to reflect partially on my experience of the last 3 years, as the B.Sc. of Computer Science I have recently undertaken is soon coming to an end. +Fortunately, this is not the end of my journey as a Computer Scientist, but there are specific things that I did not realize about Computer Science before I embarked on this endeavour, most important of which is this: Computer Science is 90% reading and understanding and 10% coding. +I believe it to be the most important thing I have learned about the field itself in the last 3 years. +Here is why. +Dealing with complex problems is hard. +Programming is all about solving complex problems, programmers live by optimizing our code the best we can, and try to find solutions to problems that we encounter while doing so. +While it is no doubt nice to have a working code that does something cool, or a solution to a problem that meets the specification, I don’t think that is the mindset a programmer should have – that is, at this stage, to solve a problem is not about getting to a solution <em>somehow</em>.</p> +<p>Solving coding tasks requires time. +This might be difficult to admit for some, as it has been for me. +But understanding a problem requires patient reading and digesting the context, possible solutions and most importantly doubts one might have about their own solution. +Needless to say, if you have solved a problem without asking questions about it, then it wasn’t a difficult (by proxy important) problem to be solve in the first place. +Reading code is hard. +It’s sometimes like reading an essay in a foreign language. +Your head hurts, your eyes are getting sore, and after 6 hours of staring at the screen you conclude you don’t understand anything anymore. +One of my favourite quotes about computing from Temple OS creator, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis">Terry Davis</a>, reflects this perfectly (it’s too long to include here, so <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10916333-what-s-reality-i-don-t-know-when-my-bird-was-looking">this is the link to the GoodReads quote page</a>). +It would almost seem like this time has been wasted, since you might have not produced a line of code. +Nevertheless, this is all there is to programming.</p> +<p>After 3 years, it appears to me that my views about Computer Science aligns with those of Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra the most. +I had first stumbled on Donald Knuth’s blog long ago, while exploring Jamie Zawinski’s blog and looking for top figures in CS to study. +On his <a href="https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html">blog</a> Knuth writes: <em>What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.</em> +There it is. +Computing takes time. +There’s no silver bullet yet, and we as programmers have to take our time to think about problems in depth. +There have been many comments on the peculiar style of teaching and way of being of Edsgar Dijkstra, but I believe he has made some really good points about this too. +What describes my experience over the last 3 years well is his quote: <em>The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility[…]</em>. +I think this the approach to take, because so often computers help us verify and point out that we indeed really don’t know anything, we are just pretending we do.</p> + +</div> +<footer style="vertical-align: bottom;"> + <div style="display: block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"> + <center> + + © Copyright 2024-2025 Mateusz J. 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