"In this respect a program is like a……" — Edsger Dijkstra
"In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent"."
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Edsger Dijkstra
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73 Quotes by Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra has 73 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what…
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I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I…
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great…
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The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can…
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Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable…
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In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so…
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The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.
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We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its…
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