Edsger Dijkstra Quotes

74 quotes in 1050 categories

• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
• Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
• If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
• Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work…
• I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders…
• APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
• Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the…
• The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
• Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
• In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each…
• The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.
• We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we…
• FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now…
• Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.
• Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells…
• If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.'
• The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something…
• It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
• Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize…
• We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!

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