A little selfish of me, but I'm very sad I never got to meet him. Programming is in a rather unique state where most of the foundational people are kept alive in living memory. There's people who can recount working with Dijkstra, or Dennis Richie or Joe Armstrong. Heck, there's probably some people who can remember Von Neumann (Peter Lax?). I really hope we can keep these memories alive. There's nothing really comparable for other fields. Nobody alive today can remember working with Gauss or Riemann.
This may be a gross exaggeration, but I believe we'll look back on programming during the mid to late 20th century like we do for physics in the early to mid 20th century. We'll marvel at the amount of talent alive at the same time.
It's amusing to note that Dijkstra's most famous quote is something he never wrote.
Dijkstra submitted a letter to the editor of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) that he titled "A Case Against the Goto Statement".
Niklaus Wirth was editor of CACM at the time, and he changed the title to the infamous "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".
Our field is a young one, the "founding generation" (those which actually got computing up and running in the 50s and 60s) only started really dying of age in the 90s (Hopper, Hamming) , though it's getting pretty relentless as the early generations are now reaching their 80s and 90s (McCarthy died in 2011, Engelbart in 2013, Minsky in 2016): Hoare and Wirth are 85, Hamilton is 82, Liskov is 79, Alan Kay and Leslie Lamport are 78, Vint Cerf is 75, …
This may be a gross exaggeration, but I believe we'll look back on programming during the mid to late 20th century like we do for physics in the early to mid 20th century. We'll marvel at the amount of talent alive at the same time.