A discipline of programming

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1. wglbFeb 2025
   A Discipline of Programming, Dijkstra

   The architecture of Concurrent Programs, Per Brinch Hansen

   Literate programming--see http://www.literateprogramming.com/

   I don't recommend Design Patterns, as these are elements needed if your programming language is inadequate.

   There are many more.

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2. jasonwatkinspdxDec 2023
   Doh! Yeah that was a typo. Sorry I can't edit now. Thanks for the correction.

   Even though I don't use any of his techniques, Dijkstra's "A Discipline of Programming" did affect the way I see things considerably.

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3. User23Dec 2023
   Well it's not popular (even though it ought to be), but Edsger Dijkstra's A Discipline of Programming is an approachable and informal (by the author's standards) look at solving non-trivial problems in a provably correct way. In fact the entire EWD archive[1] can be arranged into a course pretty readily, although you'll definitely want to skim or skip large chunks of it. Also some of the papers are just acerbic observations on life, which some people like and some don't.

   And there's it's big brother Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten that more rigorously formalizes the same approach.

   Dafny[2] is one approach out of Microsoft Research that attempts to provide automated tooling around some of those concepts.

   All of the above are excellent places to start if you're interested in learning how to write better code with the imperative languages that you're actually going to use professionally.

   [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

   [2] https://dafny.org/

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4. User23Jan 2023
   A Discipline of Programming by Edsger Dijkstra. It’s an approachable introduction to a frankly under-taught approach to programming.

   Being able to apply mathematical reasoning to programming is perhaps the main reason to use a functional approach. But mathematical reasoning isn’t restricted to functional style programs! All imperative programs can be described by purely functional mappings between points in a program state space with each in scope variable naming a dimension.

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5. rramadassDec 2022
   Two books that i can recommend;

   1) A Method of Programming.

   2) A Discipline of Programming.

   Browse the EWDs and read those whose titles interest you. My favourites are those dealing with Program Correctness and Languages.

   Note that understanding Dijkstra can be hard; so don't be discouraged if you don't "get" something at the first read.

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6. User23Sep 2022
   Dijkstra’s A Discipline of Programming and its spiritual successor that he did with Scholten Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics. They changed how I think about programming.
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