EWD Manuscripts

In The You On AI Field Guide

The EWDs are unusual in format and in practice. Most are handwritten, in Dijkstra's distinctive clean script, and many include small corrections and marginal notes that show the trace of composition. They were not peer reviewed. They were circulated to a personal network of colleagues and former students and, through that network, to the broader field. Several of the most influential papers in computing history began as EWDs and were only later reworked for formal publication. Many never were.

The medium reflects Dijkstra's working method. He did not draft and revise at a keyboard; he worked out arguments by hand, on paper, often standing at a lectern. The finished manuscripts were, in effect, derivations in the mathematical sense — the written output of a thought process that had been conducted rigorously enough that the writing could serve as a record of the reasoning. This is consistent with his view of programming: the text is the proof made legible.

The full archive is maintained at the University of Texas at Austin, where Dijkstra spent the last two decades of his career, and has been scanned and made freely available online. It constitutes one of the most unusual corpora in the history of technical writing — a sustained, decades-long personal practice of informal publication that nonetheless achieved influence comparable to that of the most prestigious refereed venues.

The EWDs are also, incidentally, an object lesson in the discipline Dijkstra preached. They are short when short will serve, long when the argument requires. They state their premises explicitly. They work through their reasoning step by step. They do not hedge, but they do not claim more than they have shown. In an era of rapid-fire digital publication, the EWDs stand as a reminder of what sustained, patient technical writing looks like when the writer has taken the time to understand what she is saying.

Origin

The series began in the early 1960s, during Dijkstra's time at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, and continued through his positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Burroughs Corporation, and the University of Texas at Austin. The numbering is roughly chronological, though Dijkstra occasionally rearranged the order when preparing manuscripts for distribution.

The practice inspired similar informal publication traditions in other research communities, and the idea of a personal, numbered manuscript series has been adopted by several of Dijkstra's students and collaborators. None, however, has matched the sustained quality and influence of the original.

Key Ideas

Primary medium, not supplement. The EWDs were where Dijkstra's thought lived. The formal publications were, in many cases, rework of EWD material for conventional venues.

Derivations made legible. Each manuscript is the written record of a completed reasoning process, closer to a mathematical derivation than to a typical paper.

Personal network as distribution. The manuscripts circulated through photocopies and mail, relying on a personal network of recipients to propagate the ideas. This is not how modern scientific communication works, and the fact that it succeeded is a testament to the quality of the content.

The archive is public. The University of Texas at Austin maintains the full scanned archive, freely available, and it constitutes one of the richest resources in the history of computer science.

An argument about patient writing. In an age of accelerated publication and AI-generated text, the EWDs are a model of what sustained, patient, personally authored technical writing looks like.