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

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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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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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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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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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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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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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A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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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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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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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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... 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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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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