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Incidentally, the maintainer of the archive, Ham Richards, taught me and thousands of beginner Computer Science students Haskell in the introductory CS class. I sometimes wonder what he thinks about Haskell's recent popularity.

I don't recall using imperative programming languages until at least sophomore year.

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I think some curation is in order. I have found that studying Dijkstra's mathematical documents have been great for developing methodical, analytical thinking. They have also been indispensable for developing a taste for elegance in notation and proofs.

All of this translates directly into developing a taste for elegant (programming) interfaces and well structured architectures.

In the past, I put together a curated list of pdfs for anyone who wants to start studying and practicing Dijkstra's mathematics. Here is what I recommend:

EWD1300 - The notational conventions of the mathematics : http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF

After that, I have this collection of EWDs and other documents that offer the best, graded, introductions to the idioms and concepts of Dijkstra's mathematics:

http://bit.ly/ewdcollection

I'm not formally trained in CS, are there "modern day Dijkstras" in the field that I should read up on? I'd like to stay up on the underlying technological advances in computing, and it's just fun to read up on this stuff.