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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

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Edsger Dijkstra
Age: 72 †
Born: 1930
Born: May 11
Died: 2002
Died: August 5
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Mathematician
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
R'dam
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Dijkstra
EWD
E.W. Dijkstra
Basic
Regeneration
Students
Prior
Beyond
Programmers
Impossible
Practically
Teach
Exposure
Hope
Mentally
Good
Programming
Potential
Mutilated

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.
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In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
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There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.
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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 better.
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I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
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The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
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Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.
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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection.
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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
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If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
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When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
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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 stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.
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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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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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The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
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