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

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
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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... 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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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
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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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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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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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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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
Edsger Dijkstra
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The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
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.
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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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra