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

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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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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I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
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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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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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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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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
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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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If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
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