Re: State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Paul Koning via cctalk]

> On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:17 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk 
> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 05/04/2020 22:27, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
>> I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
>> comments were full of horseshit.  In my opinion, it's the ability to
>> translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
>> programming,
> 
> 
> Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer programmer. The two are only 
> tangentially related!

That's clearly not true.  He was hired as a programmer, the first in the 
country, by the Mathematical Center.  And he wrote a number of major programs: 
the first implementation of the Shortest Path algorithm, the world's first 
ALGOL compiler, and the THE operating system -- among others.  Also the BIOS 
for the Electrologica X1 computer, which was the topic of his Ph.D. thesis.

It's true that later on he focused on computer science theory, but to claim 
that he didn't know about programming shows a lack of understanding of his 
history.

BTW, the reason he didn't like the IBM 1620 is that you can't build a 
multiprogramming OS on it since it has no interrupts and uses blocking I/O.  

        paul