{"id":68,"date":"2002-08-10T11:45:45","date_gmt":"2002-08-10T15:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=68"},"modified":"2002-08-10T11:45:45","modified_gmt":"2002-08-10T15:45:45","slug":"cancer-considered-harmful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"Cancer Considered Harmful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra is dead of cancer at 72. He was probably best-known for his shortest-path algorithm and classic paper, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/classics\/oct95\/\">Goto Statement Considered Harmful<\/a>,&#8221; but to Dijkstra computer science owes such concepts as structured programming, synchronization, semaphores, deadly embrace, guarded command, and many, many more. He once advised a researcher looking for a topic to &#8220;Do only what only you can do,&#8221; which is the best career advice I ever heard from anyone. At least read his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.utexas.edu\/users\/EWD\/obituary.html\">obituary<\/a>; you might also have a look at his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.utexas.edu\/users\/EWD\/\">collected papers<\/a>. Many can be read by non-programmers with profit, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.utexas.edu\/users\/EWD\/ewd09xx\/EWD983.PDF\">this one<\/a>, on the scientist&#8217;s relation to society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra is dead of cancer at 72. He was probably best-known for his shortest-path algorithm and classic paper, &#8220;Goto Statement Considered Harmful,&#8221; but to Dijkstra computer science owes such concepts as structured programming, synchronization, semaphores, deadly embrace, guarded command, and many, many more. He once advised a researcher looking for <a href='https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=68' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}