With all due respect to EWD, and the wonderful things he did, I believe that he let himself get carried away with his gift for the glib aphorism. I don't think that those who post them do Dijkstra's reputation any favors.It is as if one were to fill a biography of Churchill with his clever quips and omit 1940.
Obviously, mutual exclusion is widely used. I'm not so sure that semaphores as such are used as widely (and certainly not with functions named P() and V()).
