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

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
Computer
Programmers
Therefore
Regarded
Teaching
Offense
Technology
Criminal
Use
Programming
Mind
Witty
Criminals
Cobol
Humorous
Cripples

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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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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 too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
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Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
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Beauty is our business.
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It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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I think of the company advertising Thought Processors or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
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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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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.
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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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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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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
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It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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