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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.

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
Risky
Whatever
Clumsy
Use
Inadequate
Today
Disorder
Mind
Application
Years
Programming
Fortran
Nearly
Hopelessly
Expensive
Infantile

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The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
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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 don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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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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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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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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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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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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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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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 use of COBOL cripples the mind its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
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There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.
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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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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Beauty is our business.
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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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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra