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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.

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
Possible
Programs
Without
Programming
Think
Code
Thinking
Train
Program
Pieces
Progress
Learning

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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.
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John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.
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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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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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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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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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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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Beauty is our business.
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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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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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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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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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LISP has jokingly been described as the most intelligent way to misuse a computer. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.
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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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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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