Aesthetica

Abstract

In 1965, the Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (1930–2002), then professor of mathematics at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (THE) in the Netherlands, wrote a paper titled “Programming Considered as a Human Activity” and thereby announced the birth of a movement to which he gave the name structured programming a few years later. Within the next 10 years, the movement would cause so much upheaval in the realm of programming, some came to call it a revolution—the structured programming revolution—and Dijkstra was viewed as its originator. The movement did not precipitate an overthrow of the stored-program computing paradigm as a whole, but insofar as designing and building soft ware systems was a major component of this paradigm, structured programming altered the very essence of the subparadigm in computer science that came to be called programming methodology. It brought about a new mentality concerning programming and its methodology. A major part of this mini-revolution actually occurred during the 1970s, but its foundations were laid during the second half of the 1960s by just a handful of publications. And Edsger Dijkstra was the revolutionary-in-chief. He laid out the gospel. Dijkstra’s undergraduate training was in mathematics and physics at the University of Leyden; he went on to obtain a PhD in computing in 1959 from the Mathematics Centrum in the University of Amsterdam and worked there until 1962 before accepting a chair in mathematics at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. As a computer scientist, mathematics was a source of inspiration for him, not only in terms of the method-of-proof construction, but also in the mathematician’s search for beauty in mathematical reasoning. He quoted 19th-century English logician and mathematician George Boole, who spoke of perfectness in mathematical reasoning not just in terms of efficiency, but also in whether a method exhibited “a certain unity and harmony.” And he tells us that contrary to the tacit assumption on the part of many that such aesthetic considerations as harmony and elegance were unaffordable luxuries in the hurly-burly world of programming, it actually paid to cultivate elegance. This became a mantra for him.