Best Edsger Dijkstra Quotes
- A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use.… Any
- John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how… Attention
- ...our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For… Aware
- We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and… All
- Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where… Absorb
- Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are… Believe
- ... as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my… Better
- Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated. Achieve
- Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Effective
- About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it… Axe
- Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons. Chosen
- If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start… Bugs
- Programming in Basic causes brain damage. Basic
- Beauty is our business. Beauty
- Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or applicative and you can almost… Abstract
- I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist. Computer
- Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer,… Average
- How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but… Call
- Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs. Absence
- If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't… Always Blame
- The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer. Abstraction
- Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. Aim
- In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid… Afraid
- The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. Challenge
- Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions. Apeal