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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.

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
Regarded
Activities
Vital
Effective
Programmer
Powers
Programmers
Activity
Competent
Must
Abstraction
Exploitation

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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself Dijkstra would not have liked this, well, that would be enough immortality for me.
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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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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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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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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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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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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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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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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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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Beauty is our business.
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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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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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