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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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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
Firstly
Secondly
Compete
Chosen
Competition
Weapons
Experience

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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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 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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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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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
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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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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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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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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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I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
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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 art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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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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