Edsger Dijkstra Quotes

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Edsger Dijkstra

Profession : Scientist

Birth : May 11, 1930

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

Edsger Dijkstra

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Edsger Dijkstra

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Edsger Dijkstra

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

Edsger Dijkstra

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Edsger Dijkstra

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

Edsger Dijkstra

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Edsger Dijkstra

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

Edsger Dijkstra

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called 'life', expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

Edsger Dijkstra

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Edsger Dijkstra

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Edsger Dijkstra

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

Edsger Dijkstra

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 is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Edsger Dijkstra

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Edsger Dijkstra

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

Edsger Dijkstra

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

Edsger Dijkstra

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

Edsger Dijkstra

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

Edsger Dijkstra

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 with ten blunt axes instead.

Edsger Dijkstra

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

Edsger Dijkstra