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

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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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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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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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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I mean, 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.
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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four probably it is worse.
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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
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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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It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
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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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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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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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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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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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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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