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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!

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
Giving
Programming
People
Younger
Careful
Follow
Advice
Give
Sometimes
Must

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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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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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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Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.
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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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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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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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If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.
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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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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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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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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 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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Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
Edsger Dijkstra