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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.

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
Perfection
Headings
Days
Mentioned
Spirit
Fashionable
Competitive
Excellence
Concept
Concepts
Explicitly
Notion
Heading

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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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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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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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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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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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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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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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
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PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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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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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.
Edsger Dijkstra