From Dijkstra to Me in Four Papers

I haven’t written in a while. I at least wanted to write about going snowshoeing while attending an avalanche class. I’ll get to it some day.

Today I found a website that computes distance between computer scientists. Kind of like the Erdős number, but in computer science.

The world is small: I can get from Dijkstra to me in just four papers.

1. Edsger W. Dijkstra
   
   worked on 1 publication with
2. Alan J. Perlis
   
   worked on 2 publications with
3. John McCarthy
   
   worked on 2 publications with
4. Robert Cartwright
   
   worked on 3 publications with Mathias Ricken

There are several different ways of getting there:

1. ALGOL Sub-Committee Report – Extensions.
   
   Edsger W. Dijkstra and W. Heise and Alan J. Perlis and Klaus Samelson
   
   Commun. ACM, 1959
2. Revised report on the algorithm language ALGOL 60. (DOI)
   
   John W. Backus and Friedrich L. Bauer and Julien Green and C. Katz and John McCarthy and Alan J. Perlis and Heinz Rutishauser and Klaus Samelson and Bernard Vauquois and Joseph Henry Wegstein and Adriaan van Wijngaarden and Michael Woodger and Peter Naur
   
   Commun. ACM, 1963
   
   
   
   Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60. (DOI)
   
   John W. Backus and Friedrich L. Bauer and Julien Green and C. Katz and John McCarthy and Alan J. Perlis and Heinz Rutishauser and Klaus Samelson and Bernard Vauquois and Joseph Henry Wegstein and Adriaan van Wijngaarden and Michael Woodger
   
   Commun. ACM, 1960
3. First Order Programming Logic. (DOI)
   
   Robert Cartwright and John McCarthy
   
   Proceedings of the Conference Record of the Sixth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 1979
   
   
   
   Recursive programs as functions in a first order theory. (DOI)
   
   Robert Cartwright and John McCarthy
   
   Proceedings of the Mathematical Studies of Information Processing, 1978
4. DrHJ: a lightweight pedagogic IDE for Habanero Java. (DOI)
   
   Jarred Payne and Vincent Cavé and Raghavan Raman and Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright and Vivek Sarkar
   
   Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, 2011
   
   
   
   Test-first Java concurrency for the classroom. (DOI)
   
   Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright
   
   Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, 2010
   
   
   
   ConcJUnit: unit testing for concurrent programs. (DOI)
   
   Mathias Ricken and Robert Cartwright
   
   Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, 2009