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Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.

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
Independent
Suffers
Motivational
Competence
Industry
Continuity
Company
Employees
Suffering
Dogma
Individual
Employee
Stability
Sake
Managerial

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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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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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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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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 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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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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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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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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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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Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.
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Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
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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 should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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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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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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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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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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