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diff --git a/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html b/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 447d489..0000000 --- a/public/posts/dijkstra-knuth/index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,85 +0,0 @@ -<head> - <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="manifest" href="/images/site.webmanifest"> - <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> - book blog - </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: inline-block; margin-left:15px;"> - <center> - - © Copyright 2024-2025 Mateusz J. 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