Juri Pakaste
writes about Bertrand Meyers' OO book and also mentions Dijkstra. I do have some experience with UML in industry and in academics, and I
very well recognize the "trying to sell a pile of books and
consulting" part Juri writes about. Amusing and amazing, it works for
so many "consultants". I was there.
Did you know that the title of the famous "goto considered harmful"
article was made up by the editor of a journal? Dijkstra submitted it
with another title (mentioned in one of his EWDs, but I can not search
those now), and everything was in a rush to finish the journal (or
proceedings?) and the editor changed it to Letter to the Editor and
then gave it a new title. That editor was Niklaus Wirth, of Pascal
fame.
Also: Dijkstra was not a fan of OO, and did not like meaningful
variables (in math:-).
More people are mentioning Dijkstra recently: Ken
Arnold compares writings by Edsger Dijkstra with writings by
Alan Turing with Strunk & White in his hand. Let us not forget that
Dijkstra was not a native english speaker, but dutch, like me, and I
can tell you that it is really hard sometimes to express yourself well
in another language. Still, Ken Arnold has a(nother) writing by
Dijkstra on his "topnotch" list. I think that is truly amazing for a
dutchman, even if you live for a very long time in the USA.