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

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
Factors
Luxury
Failure
Success
Dispensable
Decides
Congratulations
Elegance
Factor

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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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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
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Beauty is our business.
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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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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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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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If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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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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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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Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
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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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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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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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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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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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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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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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