Dijkstra

I am actually unsure if I had him. Maybe it was one of his close students. Benji, do you know if he taught at all?

BTW, this post is pretty lousy. Sorry. :(

I saw an article on Dijkstra today. I commented, and it was lost, so I'll put it here. Dijkstra is a really famous computer scientist. Here's a reply to a comment about starting this paper at zero:

That is no joke. I had him at UT and it is completely instilled in me that 0 is the proper starting point. He was adamant about that.

I lost my original comment in this maze of comments, but had said that his class kicked my butt. I think he had stooped down and taught an undergrad class... which I think he may have stopped prematurely because it went so bad... We sucked!

I think he may have been a guest teacher experimenting or something because I don't think I had him for an entire semester.

To this day I feel sloppy as a coder. Much of the problem is the complexity in dealing with gluing systems together... and things seemed kinked. I wish I could write more stand-alone perfect little chunks... if only. There's a certain amount of sloppiness that I think is human... like the impressionist art.

One thing that bothered me at that time, and still does, was/is the down-the-nose view of fractal geometry (not Dijkstra... just the math department in general... it was pretty snooty (that may be unfair)). I heard "pretty pictures, that's all it is". Actually, you got the impression that there were genius guys and dummies (and most likely you were a dummy). The goal was to show'em up.

I'm probably wrong, but I think Dijkstra may have been battling/toying with the unknown, this grimy unknown that is emerging. He is from the Netherlands, and just found out that he died in Nuenen in 2002, the same place I just was painting that church of Van Gogh's. Bet he liked Piet Mondrian more :)