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

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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor 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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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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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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... 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 limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.
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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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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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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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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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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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Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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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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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
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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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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
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