Did Alan Turing play a major role in the advent of the all-purpose computer? Did Turing Award winners, like Edsger W. Dijkstra, depend on his famous accomplishments? In his well-researched book The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra, Edgar G. Daylight deromanticizes Turing's &amp; logic's role in the history of computing. Dijkstra's pioneering work in compilers lies at the heart of modern-day computers. The book vividly describes how &amp; why Dijkstra's ideas stood out among those of his contemporaries. This book includes interviews with Turing Award winners Tony Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, Peter Naur, and Barbara Liskov. “The Dawn of Software Engineering is a rich and fascinating account of the time when software engineering was a compelling intellectual discipline at the center of computer science.” — John C. Reynolds, CMU “wonderfully novel, very readable, and most engaging” — Grady Booch, IBM Fellow “a very deserving contribution to understanding the influence of fundamental results of science onto practice” — Manfred Broy, TUM

The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra

Computers & Technology

Hoare, Tony

WIRTH, NIKLAUS

Naur, Peter

Liskov, Barbara

Daylight, Edgar G.

Computer Science

Lonely Scholar

Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky's theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about Fermat's number theory, but I wasn't manipulating symbols the way I did when I was writing a compiler. With Chomsky, wow, I was actually doing mathematics and computer science simultaneously." How, when, and why did mathematics and computing converge for Knuth? To what extent did logic and Turing machines appear on his radar screen? The early years of convergence ended with the advent of Structured Programming in the late 1960s. How did that affect his later work on TeX? And what did "structure" come to mean to Knuth? Shedding light on where computer science stands today by investigating Knuth's past -- that's what this booklet is about.

The Essential Knuth

Knuth, Donald E.

"A prize of $10 from Blum, $10 from Meyer, £4 from Paterson and 30-DM from Schnorr is offered to anyone who first solves the Cook-Karp problem whether P = NP. Blum bet $100 that P != NP against Paterson's $1 that P = NP." -- SIGACT News, January 1973, page 3 These playful bets capture youthful optimism in Complexity Theory. Did Donald E. Knuth share this optimism at the time? And how did the findings of complexity theorists interlace with Knuth's pioneering work in the Analysis of Algorithms? By investigating Knuth's developing thoughts on the theoretical underpinnings of efficient computation, this book sheds light on Knuth's present-day conjecture that P = NP.

Algorithmic Barriers Falling: P=np?

Michael A. Jackson is fascinated by the fundamental question: What is software engineering? Jackson reflects on the constituents of software development. He contrasts the views of Edsger Dijkstra, Tony Hoare, Donald Knuth, Peter Naur, David Parnas, Christopher Strachey, Pamela Zave, and others. Some of the many interrelated topics that come to the fore are software malleability, program transformation systems, and the history of automobile engineering.

Formalism & Intuition in Software Development

Jackson, Michael A

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