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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?

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
Success
Crucial
Matter
Clarity
People
Convince
Dispensable
Luxury
Mathematicians
Simplicity
Decides
Failure
Elegance
Short
Mathematician
Call
Programming

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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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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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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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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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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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The use of COBOL cripples the mind its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
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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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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
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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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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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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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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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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.
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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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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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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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It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
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