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Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra died this week. I certainly had no personal connection to him beyond encountering some of his work in my Algorithms textbook and reading about him in various computer history books. I didn't know that I had encountered a lot of his ideas and terminology, like dining philosophers and semaphores and "don't use goto statements" and vector and stack. It is amazing to me to remember that the people who created these things that were just taken for granted during my CS curriculum were just regular people, and that these things were created so recently. I may never do anything that becomes such an important part of some group of people's body of knowledge, so I am always impressed by people who have done that.