Structured Programming

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• MaysonL · Sep 30, 2012 · Recommends

  Try "A Discipline of Programming" and "Structured Programming" by Edsger Dijkstra (the second with co-authors C. A. R. Hoare & Ole-Johan Dahl). Also, Project Oberon by Niklaus Wirth, for showing how it can be done well and clearly. SICP and How to Solve it, as…

  on “Ask HN: Are there any resources to learn how to think about programming?” ↗
• danoloan · Sep 11, 2020 · Recommends

  read Dijkstra's "Structured Programming". it will improve your programming reasoning.

  on “Ask HN: I'm a terrible developer, what now?” ↗
• akiarie · Apr 5, 2024 · Recommends

  …efforts in this area, because every function can be verified by itself. Notably, Dafny recognised this point before us, and the earliest clear statement we can find regarding it is in Dijkstra's "Notes on Structured Programming", in his chapter "On a Program Model". You may find that illuminating read. I'm no expert on Clang/GCC and the new annotation syntax for C and C++, but from what I've seen it's not general enough for…

  on “Xr0: C but Safe” ↗
• todd8 · Aug 24, 2017 · Mentions

  My undergraduate thesis (1974) advisor was Dr. Barbara Liskov who was designing CLU, which became a very influential research language. The first thing she told me to do was to read a small book, Structured Programming by Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare. She particularly wanted me to read the chapter by Dahl on Sumula-67. Simula was an important contribution to the development of modern programming languages, by way of Sumula…

  on “Simula 50 years” ↗
• todd8 · Apr 9, 2020 · Mentions

  …Smalltalk. Barbara Liskov lent me a book that described it in 1973 and recommended that I read about Simula 67 before starting to work on a small part of the the CLU compiler design. I believe the book was Structured Programming by Dijkstra, Hoare, and Dahl. It had a chapter by Dahl describing Simula 67.

  on “Simula: A VR window manager for Linux” ↗
• edw519 · Nov 29, 2007 · Mentions

  …compelled to respond that I slowed down and then realized that you are the same person I "debated" with just the other day in the Crappy Programmer thread. You referred to the work of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Structured Programming) as "idiocy" and presumed to know what I thought (which included a "borderline" personal attack). I responded to your last post here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83191 but never heard from you…

  on “Cybersquatter email” ↗
• AYBABTME · Aug 1, 2013 · Mentions

  …conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline! - Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth , quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements" https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra

  on “Twelve Go Best Practices” ↗
• mynjin · May 5, 2020 · Mentions

  …that set up the groundwork. The more I read, the more I find that tech doesn't learn much from its past and we're just stuck with many inferior iterations of the same things. I found a copy of, Notes On Structured Programming, by Dijkstra. I'm going to start giving it a read tomorrow (it's a whopping 88pg essay). It seems that Dijkstra did a lot of paper design work because he was programming for hardware that didn't exist…

  on “Ask HN: How to hole up in a cabin in the woods to write my great software idea?” ↗
• Supermancho · Nov 22, 2021 · Mentions

  Not so much .NET/Java but Structured Programming (1972 Edsger W. Dijkstra, Ole-Johan Dahl, and Tony Hoare) has prompted the gradual backlash against switches. (https://youtu.be/eEBOvqMfPoI?t=1512, re: Duff's Device). Senior developers should watch the…

  on “When are enums not a code smell?” ↗
• rramadass · Feb 15, 2023 · Mentions

  …grasp. It is with the above points in mind that one should interpret Knuth's nuanced quote above. He had the highest of regards/respect for Dijkstra (see his detailed review (pdf) of Dijkstra's book "Structured Programming" at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/371/CS...) Given that Donald Knuth is the "Patron Saint of Yak Shaves" (https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/) his perspective did…

• mschoenert · Feb 28, 2025 · Mentions

  This prime generating code has fascinated me for a while. It was first described by E.W. Dijkstra "Notes on Structured Programming (EWD249), 2nd; 1970; TH Eindhoven". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF And then reformulated by D.E. Knuth "Literate Programming; 1984" http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf…

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• needfish · Aug 17, 2026 · Mentions

  …post-graduation unemployed year I have been wrestling with this question a lot. The answer is that there is none - the research on the practice of translating requirements into code has stopped in the 1970s with Structured Programming (Dijkstra) and Problem Frames (Jackson). There is a certain inspiration people had with reusable patterns of problems a la Alexander, but after some time people got lost in the Java enterprise world and…

  on “Software Engineering fundamentals matter more” ↗