Adriaan van Wijngaarden offered him a job as the first computer programmer in the Netherlands at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, where he worked from 1952 until 1962.

He formulated and solved the shortest path problem in 1956, and in 1960 developed the first compiler for the programming language ALGOL 60 in conjunction with colleague Jaap A. Zonneveld.

He and his wife returned from Austin to his original house in Nuenen, where he died on 6 August 2002 after a long struggle with cancer.

His father was a chemist who was president of the Dutch Chemical Society; he taught chemistry at a secondary school and was later its superintendent.

Dijkstra stumbled on his career by accident, and through his supervisor, Professor Johannes Haantjes [nl], he met Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the director of the Computation Department at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, who offered Dijkstra a job; he officially became the Netherlands' first "programmer" in March 1952.

The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what?

I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed.

This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could.When Dijkstra married Maria "Ria" C. Debets in 1957, he was required as a part of the marriage rites to state his profession.

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.

[6] Dijkstra formulated and solved the shortest path problem for a demonstration at the official inauguration of the ARMAC computer in 1956.

[11] Dijkstra joined the Burroughs Corporation—a company known then for producing computers based on an innovative hardware architecture—as its research fellow in August 1973.

In fact, Dijkstra was the only research fellow of Burroughs and worked for it from home, occasionally travelling to its branches in the United States.

He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series (described below), most of them technical reports, for private circulation within a select group.

[6] Dijkstra accepted the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.

[6] Dijkstra and his wife returned from Austin to his original house in Nuenen, Netherlands, where he found that he had only months to live.

However the pauses also served as a way for him to think on his feet and he was regarded as a quick and deep thinker while engaged in the act of lecturing.

Even after he succumbed to his UT colleagues' encouragement and acquired a Macintosh computer, he used it only for e-mail and for browsing the World Wide Web.

He had no use for word processors, believing that one should be able to write a letter or article without rough drafts, rewriting, or any significant editing.

[10] When colleagues prepared a Festschrift for his sixtieth birthday, published by Springer-Verlag, he took the trouble to thank each of the 61 contributors separately, in a hand-written letter.

Most were about mathematics and computer science; others were trip reports that are more revealing about their author than about the people and places visited.

Many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copies, so the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community.

More than 1300 EWDs have been scanned, with a growing number transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.

His 1968 letter to the editor of Communications of ACM, "Go To statement considered harmful", caused a major debate.

Another concept formulated by Dijkstra in the field of distributed computing is that of self-stabilization – an alternative way to ensure the reliability of the system.

[39] In 1990, on occasion of Dijkstra's 60th birthday, the Department of Computer Science (UTCS) at the University of Texas at Austin organized a two-day seminar in his honor.

Speakers came from all over the United States and Europe, and a group of computer scientists contributed research articles which were edited into a book.

Beginning in 2005, this award recognizes the top academic performance by a graduating computer science major.

[41] The Department of Computer Science (UTCS) at the University of Texas at Austin hosted the inaugural Edsger W. Dijkstra Memorial Lecture on 12 October 2010.