Editing Edsger W. Dijkstra (section)

===Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam===
From 1952 until 1962, Dijkstra worked at the [[Mathematisch Centrum]] in Amsterdam,<ref name="Apt, Krzysztof R. 2002"/> where he worked closely with [[Bram Jan Loopstra]] and [[Carel S. Scholten]], who had been hired to build a computer. Their mode of interaction was disciplined: They would first decide upon the interface between the hardware and the software, by writing a programming manual. Then the hardware designers would have to be faithful to their part of the contract, while Dijkstra, the programmer, would write software for the nonexistent machine. Two of the lessons he learned from this experience were the importance of clear documentation, and that program debugging can be largely avoided through careful design.<ref name="Dijkstra_bio"/>
Dijkstra formulated and solved the [[shortest path problem]] for a demonstration at the official inauguration of the ARMAC computer in 1956. Because of the absence of journals dedicated to automatic computing, he did not publish the result until 1959.

At the Mathematical Centre, Dijkstra and his colleague {{Interlanguage link|Jaap Zonneveld|nl}} developed the first [[compiler]] for the programming language [[ALGOL 60]] by August 1960, more than a year before a compiler was produced by another group.<ref name="Dijkstra_bio"/> ALGOL 60 is known as a key advance in the rise of structured programming.