[skrebbel]

IMO that's the least spectacular of his contributions. It's not like that algorithm is particularly mindblowing. In fact, I'd wager that any sufficiently experienced engineer with some algorithm work under their belt would arrive at the exact same thing. Actually, I bet there's engineers all over the world who invent it every year, independently, simply because they need it and they didn't go to college or know that there's a thing out there called "Commonly Known Algorithms That Have Names and Wikipedia Pages" so they just worked it out.

In fact, I'd wager someone already came up with it somewhere before Dijkstra did, put it in the code (or, well, on the punch card), and quietly went home, happy about a good day's work.

Dijkstra just was the first one to publish it :-)

His true contributions were, IMO:

    * Being the first tech blogger[0] (handwritten!)
    * Teaching people to use while/for instead of goto
    * Pioneering mathematically verified algorithm derivation

He's also the reason Dutch universities have no independent Computer Science departments. They're always paired with Mathematics, even at universities of technology, which makes no sense and which has effectively halved research funding for both disciplines for decades. He was a better programmer than politician.

[0] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/indexChron.html - I'm calling it a blog because both the median length and the frequency of publishing is a lot more like blogging than anything else. I'm not aware of other people doing this as much in that day and age (but I'm probably wrong)

[dragonwriter]

> Being the first tech blogger (handwritten!)

It's not a web log (for which “blog” is short) if it's not on the web.

[EliRivers]

I've certainly heard the youngsters describe something as "a blog, but on paper". Son enough, the word 'blog' will transcend its etymology.