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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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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
Mathematical
Recognize
Mathematics
Technology
High
Today
People
Celebrated
Essentially

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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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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.
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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 computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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Beauty is our business.
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Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
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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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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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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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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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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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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?
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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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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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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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