ddw@cornell.UUCP (David Wright) (07/24/83)
From: ddw (David Wright)
To: net-misc
The response to the survey was underwhelming (only four replies). For those
who missed the original announcement, I was asking what name people thought
was omitted from the poem in the April issue of SIGPLAN. Of the four replies,
three guessed that the omitted name was Dijkstra, and one did not know.
Well, campers, the omitted name was actually EDSGER! Remember, the poem
being parodied was "You Are Old, Father William," so clearly a first name was
needed. So all you people who guessed Dijkstra get half credit.
The moral of the story: never send poems to R.L. Wexelblat unless he signs
a statement in blood that he won't delete anything.
Oh, yes: there was one other omission in the poem, so I'll publish the
entire first verse here, for those who were wondering...
"You are old, Father Edsger," the young man said,
"All your papers these days look the same;
Those EWD's would be better unread --
Do these facts never fill you with shame?"
For those not hep to the lingo, EWD reports are a series of monographs by
Dijkstra (he must produce at least one per week). Every so often they get
collected into a book. \A Discipline of Programming/ started like this, and
so did his latest, "Selected Writings on Computing."
David Wright
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