alt Hacker NewsI'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight forward, until you step into another world.
You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your commentary.
I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe Haldeman.
And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.