Edsger Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist who fought, more fiercely than almost anyone, to make programming a rigorous discipline rather than a craft of trial and error. He gave us the shortest-path algorithm that bears his name, semaphores for coordinating concurrent processes, and the structured-programming movement — including the famous argument that the unrestrained goto statement was "considered harmful."

For Dijkstra a program was a mathematical object whose correctness should be proved, not merely tested: "testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs." His acid, handwritten essays (the EWDs) still circulate as a kind of conscience for the field. He sits within languages & paradigms.